"Manin' that if she comes to it cross it's cross answers she gits.
It's right ye are, ma'am. 'Tis so about likin' or hatin' yer work.
Days when yer bring happiness to yer work it goes like a bird, an' days
when ye have the black dog on yer back the work turns round an' fights
wid yer."
Ethel Blue listened intently. Things like that had happened to her but
she had not supposed that grown people had such experiences. She
remembered a day during the previous week when she had waked up cross.
A dozen matters went wrong before she left the house to go to school.
On the way the mud pulled off one of her overshoes, and her boot was
soiled before she was shod again. The delay made her five minutes late
and caused a black mark to deface her perfect attendance record. Every
recitation went wrong in one way or another, and every one she spoke to
was as cross as two sticks. As she thought it over she realized that
if what Mrs. Schuler and Moya said was true the whole trouble came from
herself. When she woke up not in the best of humor she ought to have
smoothed herself out before she went down to breakfast, and then she
would have picked her way calmly over the crossing and not tried to
take a short cut through the mud; she would not have been delayed and
earned a tardy mark; she would have had an unclouded mind that could
give its best attention to the recitations so that she would have done
herself justice; people would have been glad to talk to her because she
looked cheerful and was in a sunny mood and no one would have been
cross.
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