She looked wildly at Mr. Meadowcroft, who was jotting down figures in the big record book. And suddenly the girl knew that she hated him. Betty Pogany, who had never in all her life hated anyone, who was gentle and charitable and affectionate even towards her Aunt Sarah, who was acknowledged by everyone to be uncommonly disagreeable,—Betty Pogany felt that she hated this man as she would have hated those terrible people in the French Revolution who sent Marie Antoinette upon that awful way to the guillotine.
CHAPTER XXXII
BY the time school was dismissed and the extra class called upon to recite, Betty’s feelings were so wrought up that she felt like throwing her books on the floor and screaming. She couldn’t bear to look at Rose. She couldn’t endure thinking what their presence here—their absence from Dr. Vandegrift’s office—signified. And yet she could think of nothing else.
She wasn’t prepared with the lesson. After she had failed twice, Meadowcroft asked if she hadn’t studied it.
“A little,” she said.
“A little—what does that mean?”
“On the train last night,” she said. She didn’t explain that even that little preparation had been perfunctory. For in her heart she had believed that she wouldn’t be present at the recitation. She would be at Millville or on the way back.
Meadowcroft looked at her despairingly.
“And you have had nearly two hours just now,” he declared. “You have had nothing since ten minutes before two. Do you mean to tell me you wasted all that time?”
Chatter about wasting time meant little to Betty’s broken heart.