Some of the more credulous among the feminine First Readers also weighed these precepts in the balance and found them wanting.
"You know how Teacher says," Sarah Schodsky remarked to Bertha Binderwitz, as the two friends, arms intertwined, heads close together, walked and talked in the yard at the recess hour. "You know how she says we dasen't never to tell no lies."
Bertha nodded. "That's how she _says_," she agreed.
"Well," resumed Sarah, "you see how Mamie Untermeyer don't comes no more on the school?"
"Well, Mamie she lives by her auntie. She is got a awful auntie. Und she asks her auntie for a penny for buy hokey pokey. Und her auntie makes a mean laugh und says, 'What you think I am, anyway?' und Mamie, she tells it right out what she thinks over her auntie, like Teacher says, 'We shall all times tell what we thinks.' She lays on the bed now mit bangages on the head. It ain't so awful healthy you shall tell truths on aunties."
This report also reached the rabbit ears of Isidore Cohen. And again he wondered that Miss Bailey should waste her time--and his--in folly.
And then he made an amazing discovery. Teacher actually believed what she taught. She was ready to meet confidence with trust, and to practise what she preached.
"I never seen nothing like it," he reported to his friend, Hymie Solomon. "She looks like she knew a awful lot, but she don't know nothings 'tall."
"What do you suppose is the matter with her?" demanded Hymie. "Miss Blake, she don't act crazy. She don't give us no talk 'out no sense."
Now Hymie and Isidore were old friends and cronies. In the days before a Truant Officer and their distracted fathers had consigned them to school, Hymie and he had trod the ways which might have led them to the Children's Court and the Reformatory; but the Board of Education chanced to be the first power that laid hands upon them, and Hymie, who was a year older than his friend, and who had once undergone some intermittent education, was put in Miss Blake's class, while Isidore, virgin soil where prescribed learning was concerned, joined the First Readers. Miss Bailey's teachings as reported by Isidore formed amazing subjects for conversation.
"Und she says," he would report, "that nobody dasn't to steal nothings off of somebody."