INTRODUCTION
her keen insight into child life. Here are sentences taken from her record of a seven-year-old boy. “Ferris is fond of making experiments of various kinds. How far can the pencil be moved before it falls? How high can the chairs be piled before spilling? He conceived the idea on a cold day of ‘warming’ his little sister’s beads on his father’s stove. That the beads were hot enough to burn the child when she put them on was not part of the experiment.”
“Where is Miss Earhart now?” “Is she still flying?” “Gee, I hope she beats that other woman.” These and hundreds of other questions greeted us on Tyler Street. “Is she coming back soon?” “I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about her flying.”
The day she told me of the trans-Atlantic project, and swore me to secrecy, she said, “And I’ll be back for summer school. I have weighed the values and I want to stay in social work.” Her simplicity, her honesty, her complete lack
15
