Joanna clearly stood for something in the class. Peter noted a little enviously the quality of the tone in which Miss Shanley addressed her. To other children she said, “Gertrude, can you tell me about the Articles of Confederation?” Usually she implied a doubt, which Gertrude usually justified. But she was sure of Joanna. The tenseness of her attitude might be seen to relax; her mentality prepared momentarily for a rest. “Joanna will now tell us—” she would announce. For Joanna, having a purpose and having been drilled by Joel to the effect that final perfection is built on small intermediate perfections, got her lessons completely and in detail every day.
It was at this time and for many years thereafter characteristic of Peter that he, too, wanted to shine, but did not realize that one shone only as a result of much mental polishing personally applied. Joanna’s assurance, her air of purposefulness, her indifference intrigued him and piqued him. He sidled across to the blackboard nearest her—if they were both sent to the board—cleaned hers off if she gave him a chance, managed to speak a word to her now and then. He even contrived to wait for her one day at the Girls’ entrance. Joanna threw him a glance of recognition, swept by, returned.
His heart jumped within him.
“If you see my sister Sylvia—you know her?—tell her not to wait for me. I have to go early to my music-lesson. She’ll be right out.”
Sylvia didn’t appear for half an hour and Peter should have been at the butcher’s, but he waited. Sylvia and Maggie Ellersley came out laughing and glowing. Peter gave the message.
“Thanks,” said Sylvia prettily. Maggie stared after him. She was still the least bit bold in those days.
“Ain’t he the best looker you ever saw, Sylvia? Such eyes! Who is he, anyway? Not ever Joanna’s beau?”
“Imagine old Joanna with a beau.” Sylvia laughed. “He’s just a new boy in her class. He is good looking.”
Some important examinations were to take place shortly and Miss Shanley planned extensive reviews. She was a thorough if somewhat unimaginative teacher and she meant to have no loose threads. So she devoted two days to geography, two more to grammar, another to history, one to the rather puzzling consideration of that mysterious study, physiology. Perhaps by now the class was a bit fed up with cramming, perhaps the children weren’t really interested in physiological processes. Joanna wasn’t, but she always got lessons like these doggedly, thinking “Soon we’ll be past all this,” or “I’m going to forget this old stuff as soon as I grow up.” Poor Miss Shanley was in despair. She could not call on Joanna for everything. Pupil after pupil had failed. Her eye roved over the room and fell on Peter’s black head.
She sighed. He had not even been a member of the class when she had taught this particular physiological phenomenon. “Can’t anyone besides Joanna Marshall give me the ‘Course of the Food?’ ”
Peter raised his hand. “He looks intelligent,” she thought. “Well, Bye you may try it.”
“I don’t think I can give it to you the way the others say it,”—the children had been reciting by rote, “but I know what happens to the food.”
She knew he would fail if he didn’t know it her way, but she let him begin.
This was old ground for Peter. “Look, I can draw it. See, you take the food in your mouth,” he drew a rough sketch of lips, mouth cavity and gullet, “then you must chew it, masticate, I think you said.” He went on varying from his own simplified interpretation of Meriwether Bye’s early instructions, past difficult names like pancreatic juice and thoracic duct, and while he talked he drew, recalling pictures from those old anatomies; expounding, flourishing. Miss Shanley stared at him in amazement. This jewel, this undiscovered diamond!
“How’d you come to know it, Peter?”
“I read it, I studied it.” He did not say when. “But it’s so easy to learn things about the body. It’s yourself.”
She quizzed him then while the other children, Joanna among them, stared open-eyed. But he knew all the simple ground which she had already covered, and much, much beyond.
“If all the children,” said Miss Shanley, forgetting Peter’s past, “would just get their lessons like Peter Bye and Joanna Marshall.”
She had coupled their names together! And after school Joanna was waiting for him. He walked up the street with her, pleasantly conscious of her interest, her frank admiration.
“How wonderful,” she breathed, “that you should know your physiology like that. What are you going to be when you grow up, a doctor?”
“A surgeon,” said Peter forgetting his old formula and expressing a resolve which her question had engendered in him just that second. He saw himself on the instant, a tall distinguished-looking man, wielding scissors and knife with deft nervous fingers. Joanna would be hovering somewhere—he was not sure how—in the offing. And she would be looking at him with this same admiration.
“My, won’t you have to study?” Joanna could have told an aspirant almost to the day and measure the amount of time and effort it would take him to become a surgeon, a dentist, a lawyer, an engineer. All these things Joel discussed about his table with the intense seriousness which colored men feel when they speak of their children’s
