You give a weary little shuffle—your first—and turn a page.
Two more minutes. Even yet you could catch the kids. How good you are! But, blame it, what is the sense, if she does not notice?
Tick-tock, tick-tock, repeats the monitor on the wall, checking off the wasted moments.
Ten minutes! Is she going to keep you all night? Doesn’t she see what time it is getting to be? You make a lot of noise, to warn her; but she never looks. For all that is evident, she might have forgotten the existence of you and everybody else. She simply goes on reading and marking.
Twelve minutes. You raise your hand. You keep it raised. You shuffle some more, and you cough, and you shuffle again.
“Well, John, what is it?” she vouchsafes in a tired voice.
She has heard you all the time, but you don’t know it. Neither do you know that she has been reading you while reading scrawly exercises.
“How long do I have to stay?”
“Until I tell you you may go.”
Fifteen minutes. You throw off your hypocritical sainthood, and you lapse into your genuine boiling, raging self. Darn her. Darn the teacher! Darn the old teacher! What does she care about going swimming? She just wants to keep a fellow in! You’ll show her sometime! And you shuffle and scrape and kick and bang, and she apparently pays not the least heed to it.