Catherine was one of these. She said she was so busy getting ready for the party that she had no time to study at home.
“You don’t get ready for a party at night,” Mattie Harrison told her. “You could study your homework after supper. Anyway, I don’t believe you do a thing about the party—your mother always does every single thing for you.”
But Catherine went right on, letting her homework go, and Miss Owen kept her in after school, and never paid any attention when she cried.
“Orders are orders,” Uncle Hiram always said when Elizabeth Ann told him about Catherine, who used to sit at her desk with the tears rolling down her face while the rest of the class marched out of the school at the end of the afternoon session.
If Catherine were kept in too late she missed the bus—which left half an hour after school closed on clear days and fifteen minutes after on stormy days. Miss Owen didn’t like to have anyone miss the bus, and if she could possibly dismiss her pupils she did it in time to let them make connections. It was a rule that all the children who had to wait for the bus must play in the school yard, and one of the teachers always stayed till the bus came. This was because some boys and girls were absent-minded and would have allowed the bus to go without them if a teacher had not been on hand to remind them to stop playing.
“I think,” said Uncle Hiram when he heard that Catherine had had to stay in for the third afternoon in one week, “I think Miss Owen will be glad when this party is over.”
Dave, the driver of the bus, had heard about the party, too. Catherine talked of nothing else. And once, when she missed the bus in the morning and had had to go home, because there wasn’t time to walk all the distance to school, she said that Dave was ahead of his time and that she meant to ask her father to complain to the School Board.
Elizabeth Ann told Doris that she thought perhaps it was better not to have your mother let you do just as you pleased—for Catherine apparently expected everyone else to let her do as she pleased. And it wasn’t always convenient.
One morning, a few days before Hallowe’en, Elizabeth Ann and Doris were hurrying to make the bus. They were a little late for they had waited for Catherine as long as they dared. Finally Aunt Grace had telephoned Catherine’s mother who said that Catherine was just eating her breakfast. She said that Elizabeth Ann and Doris should go on and that Catherine’s daddy would take her in the car as far as the cross-roads.
It was a cold morning—all the lovely fall weather had gone and the sky was gray, while a keen wind blew over the fields—and Elizabeth Ann and Doris were glad to walk fast.