“Sh-sh!” warned Isabel, “go along.”
The girls began to arrive for class, one or two at a time at first. Fortunately for the scheme the Latin room was at a corner of the building, where the noise of the dismissal of classes was least, and the learned Doctor was very absent-minded.
The sound of the last bell had died away. Isabel and Grace kept count and knew that the last Cicero girl had come and gone, those who did not understand with thankful, smiling looks and no disposition to go to the door to view the notice more closely, and those who were in the plan with careful tip-toeing and looks of joy.
Grace whisked up the stairs in the front of the building, and Isabel up the back stairs, there to meet and giggle, as Dr. Carver at last opened her door and came out in perplexed surprise. She looked up and down the hall, and even went out to the front entrance. Then coming back, she saw the notice. Isabel, who had been leaning over the bannister to see Dr. Carver’s movements, backed away into Grace’s arms with a suppressed shriek. “I wish you had seen her face when she caught sight of that notice! She’ll finish all of us tomorrow sure! Let’s pass the word around to have perfect lessons!”
Grace took a peep, but turning hastily, caught Isabel’s arm. “Hurry, she’s coming up!” Up the second flight to the third story they tiptoed, right over the angry Doctor’s head, and thankful they were that she was fat and slow.
“Come on; we’ll be in the library reading, and not together.”
“Not I,” said Grace, “I’m going to be safe in my little room over at Greycliff Hall. Watch me get down the front stairs!”
The next day faces of great innocence met Dr. Carver’s shrewd looks. After marking her roll, she made a few sarcastic remarks about pupils who had nothing better to do than play tricks. “It is an evidence of low order of intellect,” said she. More than once she looked sternly at one of the girls who was a gay little thing and rarely had her lessons, but was entirely innocent of any part in this.
“If I did not know that this class is not capable of getting even the usual number of lines, and that I would punish the innocent with the guilty, I would give you a double lesson for tomorrow. But for the present we shall let it go. After this, when you see a notice on a teacher’s door take the trouble to try the door and see if the notice has been put up by authority. Under similar circumstances, hereafter, each pupil will receive a zero for the recitation missed. And let me remark that if any of you are interested in passing the course, you can ill afford to have a zero included among grades that are none too high as it is!”
And the Cicero class surely had reason to squirm that day. No matter how fine the reading, Dr. Carver asked the most unheard of questions (according to their story), and pushed the discussions of subjunctives until, as Eloise said afterward, they all knew that they had never even heard anything before about a Latin verb, let alone understanding it! Ordinarily Eloise and Hilary were ready for the questions on syntax, but today they only shook their heads at the rapid fire of questions put in the “scientific” foreign fashion of making everything as profound and obscure as possible. With dazed eyes they watched the satisfied way in which the offended Doctor of Philosophy recorded grades after their efforts to recite, “zeros at most,” said Eloise, “and no doubt she had invented something lower, maybe a zero minus.”