“I have done nothing wrong, Miss Warren,” Gorgas stirred her nervous tongue to say.
Miss Warren fixed her with a smile.
“I can quite comprehend,” she said, “that you think you have done nothing wrong. However, your parents, wisely or not, have permitted us to be the sole judge in such matters. You will find us very fair and very just; and also very firm.”
The interview with Miss Warren was full of the same numbing type of monologue. But no other “punishment” followed. Gorgas was led to feel that she was on probation; that mercy had been shown to her ignorance of the rights of constituted authority; and that her future stay in the school would be entirely dependent on herself. In the whole interview Gorgas spoke not a single word.
But she raged, nevertheless, at the public humiliation. In the recess periods the girls hailed her with delight, but she got no joy from that. Mistily she thought of Bardek and the free play of thought that he allowed, by which she learned prodigiously every minute; and she thought of Allen Blynn, who treated her as a human being and opened up springs of intellectual delight for her thirsty soul; and even of Leopold, who talked science with her as if she were a colleague. And in none of her conversations with those men had there been aught of heights of mountains, and boundaries of counties, and populations of cities.
One evening, when she had been struggling to memorize a list of uses of the French subjunctive, she resolved to rebel. Leopold had dropped in and had wasted the best part of her study period by chattering with her in French. Together they had reviewed the French lesson for the morrow and agreed that for them the French subjunctive did not exist.
“Even the French do not know those rules,” he told her. “And many persons know them perfectly without knowing French at all.”
“Then I will not learn them,” Gorgas closed her book abruptly.
“I wouldn’t do that!” he laughed. “Miss Warren will send you kiting. And then what will you do?”
“I will leave school,” she decided. “I can’t breathe in that place.”