“You will kindly leave the room, Miss Wilcox,” Miss Warren spoke with dignified forbearance. “Pray, go to my office.”
“Now, what have I done!” The young lady moved belligerently toward the hallway. “Always getting jumped on for doin’ nothin’.”
What had she done? Gorgas asked herself. But she did not ask aloud. Nor did anyone else. Thirty youngsters watched the unlucky Wilcox girl flounce out of the room, each knowing that it would mean a long lecture, a detention after school, the punishment of much memorization of Bible verses, and perhaps the writing out of a thousand replicas of the sentence, “Children should be seen and not heard”; and certainly it would mean a letter to the elder Wilcoxes, in which Bea would not appear a heroine. There was no protest from her own mates, except the mute flash of understanding from one to the other which implied that here was one more irresistible victory of authority over justice.
Gorgas found herself marching in a silent line—silent save for some furtive whispering as they turned safe corners in hall or stairway—supervised by ferret-eyed teachers. She was tolled off to a group that met in one of the western rooms on the second floor. Trees—big chestnuts—shot above the windows and left a view of lawn and rising hill beyond; and some of their leaves brushed just beyond reach, so that they could be heard distinctly as they whisked back and forth against the house.
Teachers came and went. They heard lessons mainly, and gave marks in a book for every word spoken. While they were gracious in a sort of unbending way, they seemed ever alert, like a Trappist lady superior, to catch someone breaking the eternal vow of silence. Even as they relieved one another on guard, they would watch the class with worried, roving eyes, until the last reluctant moment. That vigilance crept into their faces; it labeled them wherever they went, even in their vacations!
Gorgas was mercifully permitted to look on during the long hours of that first day, although she was given detailed instructions for the lessons that were to be learned by the morrow. There was a long spelling list, including Cambodia, peristyle, ratiocination, caryatid, and other hard ones; a list of the mountains of the world with the exact height of each; a section of American history to be memorized—the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, which nobody believes nowadays—the conjugation of several French verbs, and some problem in arithmetic which aimed to discover that if fourteen men working six hours a day could dig a ditch four feet wide, six feet deep and ten feet long in three days, how many men working four days, seven hours a day, it would require to dig a ditch three feet wide, five feet deep and twelve feet long. And there was “literature”: the memorization of the dates of birth and death of Cotton Mather and his contemporaries.
The French class offered hope at first. Mlle. Schwartz—German-Swiss—looked French as she bobbed into the room, a vivacious, worried little woman. She said, “I hopp you do know the vairbs today.” It was a vain “hopp.” The pièce de resistance was a future perfect:
I shall have been regarded,
Thou shalt have been regarded,
He shall have been regarded.