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As my companion and I came into the room I noticed first that there was not that stiffening into self-consciousness which is the inevitable concomitant of “visitors” in our own schoolrooms. Most of the children, absorbed in various queer-looking tasks, did not even glance up as we entered. Others, apparently resting in the intervals between games, looked over across the room at us, smiled welcomingly as I would at a visitor entering my house, and a little group near us ran up with outstretched hands, saying with a pleasant accent of good-breeding, “Good-morning! Good-morning!” They then instantly went off about their own affairs, which were evidently of absorbing interest, for after that, except for an occasional friendly look or smile, or a momentary halt by my side to show me something, none of the little scholars paid the least attention to me.

Now I myself, like all the American matrons of my circle of acquaintances, am laboring conscientiously to teach my children “good manners,” but I decided, on the instant, nothing would induce me to collect twenty children of our town and have a Montessori teacher enter the room to be greeted by them. The contrast would be too painful. These were mostly children of very poor, ignorant, and utterly untrained parents, and ours are children of people who flatter themselves that they are the opposite of all that; but I shuddered to think of the long silent, discourteous stare which is the only recognition of the presence of a visitor in our schools. And yet I felt at once that I was attaching too much importance to a detail, the merest trifle, the slightest, most superficial indication of the life beneath. We Anglo-Saxons notice too acutely, I thought, these surface differences of manner.