Montessori mother - Kamelini Montessori

A MONTESSORI MOTHER 11
curred to me, as I looked at that quiet, smiling Italian
woman, that somehow my own life, for all its full
happiness, must lack some element of orderliness, of
discipline, of spiritual economy which alone could
have put that look of calm certainty on her face.
It was not the passive, changeless peace that one sees
in the eyes of some nuns, but a sort of rich, full-
blooded confidence in life.
She lingered beside us some moments, chatting with
my companion, who was an old friend of hers, and
who introduced her as Signorina Ballerini. I noticed
that she happened to stand all the time with her
back to the children, feeling apparently none of
that lion-tamer's instinct to keep an hypnotic eye
on the little animals which is so marked in our in-
structors. I can remember distinctly that there was
for us school-children actually a different feel to the
air and a strange look on the familiar school-furniture
during those infrequent intervals when the teacher
was called for an instant from the room and left us,
as in a suddenly rarefied atmosphere, giddy with the
removal of the pressure of her eye ; but when this
teacher turned about casually to face the room again,
these children did not seem to notice either that she
had stopped looking at them or that she was now
doing it again.
We used to know, as by a sixth sense, exactly
where, at any moment, the teacher was, and a sudden
movement on her part would have made us all start
as violently and as instinctively as little chicks at