“But it has broken up your cold,” she pleaded, “that’s certainly gone.”
“What?” said Ethelwynne fretfully, “don’t mumble so and run your words together. I can’t hear the gong very well either. And the Latin test is coming the first hour after breakfast. I haven’t had a chance to review an ode. I feel so wretched! Oh, me! oh, me!”
Ethelwynne never forgot that Latin test. The very first line written by the instructor on the blackboard smote her with despair. She had never been able to translate from hearing anyhow. This morning when Miss Sawyer took her seat on the platform and opened her book, Ethelwynne bent forward anxiously, every nerve alert and strained. What was the first word? Oh, what was it? She had not caught it. It sounded blurred and mazy with no ending at all. And the next—and the next! And the third! Now she had lost it. The first was gone. She had forgotten the second. The voice went reading on and on. She floundered after, falling farther and farther behind. There wasn’t any sense to it, and she couldn’t hear the words plainly, and everything was all mixed up. The other girls seemed to understand. They were writing down the translation as fast as they could scribble—at least some of them were. But she could not make out a particle of meaning. It was Agnes’s fault—it was all her fault. She had coaxed her to take the quinine, and now she could not hear plainly or think or remember or anything.
In wrathful discouragement she turned to the rest of the questions. One or two were short and easy. She managed to do the translations already familiar. But when she reached the last part and attempted to write down an ode which she had memorized the week before, she found that many of the words had slipped away from her. The opening line was vivid enough, then came a blank ending in a phrase that kept dancing trickily from spot to spot in her visual imagination of the page. Here she recalled two words, there three, with a vanishing, vague, intangible verse between. The meaning had slid away utterly, leaving only these faulty mechanical impressions of the way the poem had looked in print. Struggle as she would, the thought frolicked and pranced just beyond the grasp of her memory.
Ethelwynne bit her lip grimly and put the cap on her fountain-pen. It was not the slightest use. Miss Sawyer had always told them to learn the odes understandingly, not in parrot fashion. It was better to submit a blank than a paper scribbled with detached words and phrases. It was all Agnes’s fault—every bit. She had forced her to swallow that pill—the pill that had muddled her brain and dulled her hearing—the pill which was causing her to flunk in Latin. She had known that ode perfectly only the previous day. It wasn’t her fault—it was entirely Agnes’s. She would go instantly and tell her so.
And she went the moment class was over. To be sure, she did not go so fast as she wished, for her head had a queer way of spinning dizzily at every sudden movement. Once or twice her knees faltered disconcertingly in her progress down the corridor. But at last she reached the room and walked in with a backward slam of the door.
Agnes was putting the final touches to the water-color drawing of exquisite fungi before her.
“Sh-h,” she murmured, “don’t interrupt. Just one more stroke—and another—now this tiny one. There, it is finished. Professor Stratton sends her manuscript off to-day and she is waiting for this. Think of it! Thirty dollars for this sheet of paper! Thirty whole big beautiful dollars to send home for Christmas. They need it pretty badly. I’ve worked hours and hours, and now they shall have a real Christmas! I know what mother wants and couldn’t afford——”
Ethelwynne stamped her foot. “It was all your fault. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember. The pill did it. You made me take it. You always think you know best. You’re always preaching and advising. You wanted to make me flunk. You knew it would make my ears ring and my head whirl. You did it on purpose. I shall never forgive you, never, never, never!”
“What!”