Hester did her best, which was not so bad after what had gone before, and for a few moments peace descended on the room. But Hester giving place presently to her next neighbor, a boy who was only taking French because another fellow had said it was a whole lot easier than German, trouble began once more.
“That will do!” Monsieur closed his book. “It is incomprehensible—the badness of it!” He looked from one to another of the faces before him, some flushed, some indifferent, some sullen, and some genuinely distressed. “We will call it the failure—all complete. You comprehend that? The failure for each! For the next time, we take the same lesson. Moi, I do not permit myself the hope that it will go better, I have not the room for hope left—only the amazement, indescribable. The class is dismissed.”
Three minutes after general dismission that afternoon, an indignation meeting was held in that same little recitation-room.
“He’s an old—” Kitty’s gesture, borrowed from Monsieur, filled out her sentence.
“At least, he didn’t show any partiality—when it came to compliments,” one of the boys laughed.
“Some of us did fail,” Ruth began.
“We did,” the other cut in.
“But not all—Hester and some of the rest did all right; it wasn’t fair, giving them failures too.”
“Maybe,” another boy suggested, “he was trying to strike the general average. I say—wouldn’t Mademoiselle have been proud of us!”
“I’ll never, never recite to him again!” Debby declared.