For this one moment in the day the whole congested neighborhood had stopped its feverish labor and become an amphitheater with all eyes upon the school.

And the thought flashed into Roger's mind: "Deborah's big family!" He had a strange confusing time.

In her office, in a daze, he sat and heard his daughter with her two assistant principals, her clerk and her stenographer, plunge into the routine work of the day.

What kind of school teacher was this?
She seemed more like the manager of some buzzing factory.
Messages kept coming constantly from class-rooms, children came for punishment, and on each small human problem she was passing judgment quickly.

Meanwhile a score of mothers, most of them Italians with colored shawls upon their heads, had straggled in and taken seats, and one by one they came to her desk.