"Oh, save us! We cannot go out there; the mob will kill us! What shall we do?"
One girl of grand and noble air, as dark and handsome as an East Indian princess, and standing first in her class for scholarship, threw herself at her teacher's feet, crying, "Have pity on me, Miss ——!"
"My poor Léontine," replied the teacher, "what can I do? There are good 'colored' schools in the city; would it not have been wiser for your father to send you to one of them?"
But the girl rose up and answered:
"Must I go to school with my own servants to escape an unmerited disdain?" And the teacher was silent, while the confusion increased.
"The shame of it will kill me!" cried gentle Eugénie L——. And thereupon, at last, a teacher, commonly one of the sternest in discipline, exclaimed:
"If Eugénie goes, Marcelline shall go, if I have to put her out myself! Spanish, indeed! And Eugénie a pearl by the side of her!"
Just then Eugénie's father came. He had forced his way through the press in the street, and now stood bidding his child have courage and return with him the way he had come.
"Tie your veil close, Eugénie," said the teacher, "and they will not know you." And so they went, the father and the daughter. But they went alone. None followed. This roused the crowd to noisy anger.
"Why don't the rest come?" it howled. But the teachers tried in vain to inspire the panic-stricken girls with courage to face the mob, and were in despair, when a school official arrived, and with calm and confident authority bade the expelled girls gather in ranks and follow him through the crowd. So they went out through the iron gates, the great leaves of which closed after them with a rasping of their key and shooting of their bolts, while a teacher said: