After the banquets, Maria became busy again, so much so that she no longer had time to check on the children she had bought. Luckily, Lucia and Julia took good care of them. From their occasional reports, she learned that some brighter children could already recite all the letters and even remember a few common spelling phrases. Naturally, the first thing they learned to spell was their names. As for math, they hadn’t been taught addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division yet, but they had memorized the Arabic numbers from 0 to 10.

"Some of them are quite talented. Not only are they better at spelling than the other children, but...