She came back to the group of girls, flushed and lovely beyond compare, holding up the ravished end of that golden braid with a comic dismay, while her despoiler laughed coarsely from a distance and pinned the trophy to his coat lapel. I now saw that blasting was too merciful. He should be removed by a slower process if the thing could as easily be arranged.
That was a bitter recess, even though I learned her wonderful name and the enchanted state "back East" from which she had come. A still more bitter experience awaited me when we were again in the schoolroom. Miss Berham, fastening a steely gaze upon Solon Denney, launched heaven upon him from tightly drawn lips, without in the least meaning to do so.
"Solon Denney, you may return that ribbon at once to its owner!"
With a conscious smirk, amid the titters of the room and the sharp raps of the ruler on Miss Berham's desk, Solon swaggered offensively to the seat that enshrined my idol, and flung down the scarlet treasure before her. She merely pushed the thing away, bending her head lower above her book—pushed it away with a blind little hand, and with undiminished bravado her despoiler returned, scathless of heaven's vengeance, to his seat.
"And you may remain half an hour after school. The A-class, ready for geography!"
Thus, lightly did our ruler turn from tragedy to comedy. For tragedy, there was the look my queen lavished upon Solon when she heard his sentence; a look of blushing merriment, with a maddening dash of pity in it,—he was to suffer because of her.
"'Twas your beauty that made me do it," he might have quoted, with the old result. How I longed for the jaunty lightness that would have let me do a thing like that, tossing me fairly to the pinnacle of a public association with her! But I, instead, moped alone, knowing well that the gifts of graceful brigandage were not mine. Had I snatched that ribbon, there would have been tears and a mad outcry at my brutal roughness.
Now came the lesson in geography. I had known it, had studied it faithfully that morning. It treated of the state from which she had so lately come. But, now, all knowledge of it fled me, save that on the map it was a large, clumsy state, though yellow, the color of her hair. Was it to be bounded like any cheaper state? Did it have principal products, like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and other ordinary states? Its color was rightly golden; had it not produced her? But other products,—iron, coal, wheat,—these were stuffs too base to fellow in the same mind with her. Had it principal industries, like any red, or green, or blue state on that pedantic map? I could no longer recall them. Formally confronted with this problem, I muttered shamefully again that day in the valley of Humiliation. There was, I knew, a picture at the top of the page in which strong, rugged men toiled at various tasks; but the natures of these had escaped me. Were they mining coal or building ships, catching fish or ploughing furrows in God's green earth? Out of my darkness I stammered, "Principal industries, agriculture and fish-building—"
"That will do, Calvin! You may remain after school to-night." I had never less liked the way she said this, as if it were a boon at which I would snatch, instead of a penalty imposed.
Solon Denney followed me, glibly enumerating the industries of a great and busy state. But I could not listen. Phantom-like in my poor mind floated a wordless conviction that, however it might once have been, the state would immediately abandon its industries now that she had come away from it. I beheld its considerable area desolated, the forges cold, the hammers stilled, the fields overgrown, the ships rotting at their docks, the stalwart mechanics drooping idly above their unfinished tasks. It was not possible to suppose that any one could feel, in a state which she had left, that interest which good work demands.