Katherine accompanied her room-mate to English 13 next day with a pleasant sense of exhilaration in her heart, for wasn’t this the day Peggy was to be praised before them all—freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors alike—for her wonderful poem?
There was a little stir and flutter through Recitation room 27 as the bright-eyed young literary lights of the college trooped in.
English 13 had to be held in the largest recitation room on campus, for it was the one class that everybody would rather go to than not. It was purely elective with a number of divisions and you could walk by and decide whether or not you wanted to go in—and you always decided to go in.
Grey sweaters over the backs of chairs, a blur of black furs, youthful heads with hair all done alike, lolling arms along the chair-tops, slim white hands toying with pencils or sweater buttons—a gigantic, lazy, comfortable, enjoying-life sort of a class when you came in from the back of the room, but as you went down toward the front and glanced back, there was a light of eager anticipation shining in every face, a universal expression of intelligent interest such as it is the fortune of few college professors, alas, to behold in this world.
Peggy and Katherine had dropped the wonderful poem in the 13 box outside the door—it being written on pale-blue paper so that Peggy would recognize it at once in the bundle that would soon be brought in, in Miss Tillotson’s arms.
They sat as near the front as they could get, and that queer, unaccountable, crimson uneasiness that affects authors when their work is about to be read in public—part pleasurable but mostly agony—swept Peggy in a miserable flood and she sat deaf, dumb and blind to all that was going on around her until she heard the bell strike that announced the opening of class.
Miss Tillotson at this minute came in, her arms full of manuscript, as usual, her glance moving lightly over the rustling audience of girls, who were beginning to sit up straight with that eager interest flaming. Miss Tillotson was always sure of a response. From the moment she fingered the first manuscript and began to read in her wonderful voice that made the good things seem so much better than they were and the bad things so much worse, every pause she made, every raised-eye-brow query, every slight little twist of amused smile was received with a collective long-drawn breath, a murmur of appreciation or a small, sudden sweeping storm of laughter that convulsed the entire giant class at once, only to drop away suddenly to still attention as her voice again picked up the thread of narrative or resumed the verse.
It is a pity but true that Peggy heard absolutely nothing of her adored 13 to-day until her own blue-folded poem was lifted up. She had gone through a hundred different emotions in the few minutes that she had already spent in this classroom. Every time Miss Tillotson’s fingers lingered near her manuscript in selecting what next to read, a shiver of despair went up and down her spine. Oh, why had she done such a thing? She, only a freshman, to have had the effrontery to write a poem when all these upper-classmen—and even the Monthly board members—were in the class—and had written such wonderful things! Of course there was the approval of Katherine by which she had set so much store a short few hours ago. But—she glanced at Katherine now sitting so tranquilly beside her. Katherine was only a freshman herself! What did her approval mean? She hated herself for the disloyalty of the thought, but still she could not help wishing that she had never shown the poem to Katherine and then she could make out it was some one else’s and not have to suffer the awful humiliation——
Miss Tillotson was reading! Oh, it had actually come—this horrible calamity! Nothing could happen to save her now. Her poor little blue poem was being read out to all these wonderful girls of Hampton and she could not prevent it. Drowning, drowning in a sea of confusion, there drifted hazily through Peggy’s mind a pathetic story she had once read in a newspaper about a man whose ship was sinking and who had put a note in a bottle, “All hope gone. Good-bye forever.”
When the smooth voice of Miss Tillotson stopped there was a slight rustle over the class, and then with one accord the girls burst out into a laugh.