“Go on,” said the teacher, looking at her sharply.
The next time the little girl paused the teacher laughed out good-naturedly. “What is the matter with you, Betsy?” she said. “Go on till I tell you to stop.”
So Elizabeth Ann, very much surprised but very much interested, read on, sentence after sentence, till she forgot they were sentences and just thought of what they meant. She read a whole page and then another page, and that was the end of the selection. She had never read aloud so much in her life. She was aware that everybody in the room had stopped working to listen to her. She felt very proud and less afraid than she had ever thought she could be in a schoolroom. When she finished, “You read very well!” said the teacher. “Is this very easy for you?”
“Oh, yes!” said Elizabeth Ann.
“I guess, then, that you’d better not stay in this class,” said the teacher. She took a book out of her desk. “See if you can read that.”
Elizabeth Ann began in her usual school-reading style, very slow and monotonous, but this didn’t seem like a “reader” at all. It was poetry, full of hard words that were fun to try to pronounce, and it was all about an old woman who would hang out an American flag, even though the town was full of rebel soldiers. She read faster and faster, getting more and more excited, till she broke out with “Halt!” in such a loud, spirited voice that the sound of it startled her and made her stop, fearing that she would be laughed at. But nobody laughed. They were all listening, very eagerly, even the little ones, with their eyes turned toward her.
“You might as well go on and let us see how it came out,” said the teacher, and Betsy finished triumphantly.
“Well,” said the teacher, “there’s no sense in your reading along in the third reader. After this you’ll recite out of the seventh reader with Frank and Harry and Stashie.”
Elizabeth Ann could not believe her ears. To be “jumped” four grades in that casual way! It wasn’t possible! She at once thought, however, of something that would prevent it entirely, and while Ellen was reading her page in a slow, careful little voice, Elizabeth Ann was feeling miserably that she must explain to the teacher why she couldn’t read with the seventh-grade children. Oh, how she wished she could! When they stood up to go back to their seats she hesitated, hung her head, and looked very unhappy. “Did you want to say something to me?” asked the teacher, pausing with a bit of chalk in her hand.
The little girl went up to her desk and said, what she knew it was her duty to confess: “I can’t be allowed to read in the seventh reader. I don’t write a bit well, and I never get the mental number-work right. I couldn’t do ANYthing with seventh-grade arithmetic!”