The examiner had collected the papers once more, and laid a new one on her desk. Sarah glanced at it, then finally she raised her voice in protest.
"I don't take Civil Government," she said. "I never took it. I don't know anything about it. If I knew anything about it, I—"
"What class are you?" asked the examiner shortly.
"The sub-Junior."
"Then you don't belong here." He spoke impatiently. He remembered that the papers which she had handed in in the morning were the most voluminous in the class. Lengthy papers do not please gentlemen who have hundreds to examine. "You belong over in the other room, where the sub-Juniors are being examined in Spelling. You'll have to hurry. People that are late are sometimes refused admission."
Sarah gathered pencils and erasers and fountain-pen, and flew across the hall. The examiner there received her even less cheerfully.
"You are very late," he said sharply. "Spell 'picnicking.'"
He was somewhat mollified by her prompt answer. Ten sub-Juniors had misspelled the word.
Sarah breathed a long sigh and found a seat. Her mind was suddenly clear; she felt that she could not fail even if he gave her all the hard words in the book. Here her foot was on its native heath. William would be able to forgive her for knowing nothing about Latin, but no Wenner would ever be able to forgive her for being a poor speller.
Long after the examiner had marked them, he continued to amuse himself by giving them all the "catchy," treacherous words he could think of. He coupled words on purpose to snare them, "four" and "forty," "precede" and "proceed," "defendant" and "precedent." He gave them all the short, trying words, like "fiery," which half the class spelled "f-i-r-e-y," and all the long words, which one does not expect to meet with outside the spelling-book, like "eleemosynary" and "monocotyledon" and "asseveration." When he finished, both he and the students were out of breath. Of all the class only Sarah had not missed a word.