Never mind that Melony murdered every moment of Dickensian wit with her ferocity, or that the rich and colorful details of character and place were turned uniformly drab by her voice. “The girl has no lilt,” Nurse Edna complained. Never mind: the boys were terrified of Melony, and their fears made them pay more attention to her than they had ever paid to Homer Wells. Sometimes the interest in the literature isn’t in the literature—the boys’ division was an audience like any other: self-interest, personal memories, their secret anxieties crept into their perceptions of what they heard
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