"Thank you. I'll work while you play, like the ant and the grasshopper," said Marcia more graciously than usual.
It was a brilliant autumn afternoon, and most of the girls were tempted out. The hall was deserted, save for Marcia, scribbling hard in her room.
"Finished already?" asked Alison, coming in just in time for supper, flushed and breathless after a basketball game.
Marcia was just putting away her writing materials. She looked up nonchalantly. "Almost. I've only to correct and copy it."
"You've had a grand quiet time to work. I wish I had been as industrious; but it was so lovely out. We had a splendid practice."
Nothing was talked of in school for the next few days but the essays, which were to be handed in the week before Thanksgiving, and the prize winner would be announced on the day before—"to give us extra reason to be thankful," said Joan.
Katherine had written a scholarly essay, giving a sort of bird's-eye view of the entire field of English literature, concisely expressed. Privately, she believed herself sure of the prize, but no such self-laudatory opinion was hinted at in her dignified demeanor.
Joan had skipped airily over the earlier periods, coming rapidly down to present-day fiction in the space of four pages. "She'll like mine because it's short, anyway," she congratulated herself.
Most of the other girls had tried, because Miss Burnett wished it. Some of the efforts were better, some worse, than others, some impossible. Alison, coming from her history class one morning, suddenly realized that the time was almost up, and her essay was still unwritten. A few unfinished beginnings, rejected as unsatisfactory, were all she had to show.
She had a vacant period next, and she took a sudden resolve. "I'll write that essay in the next forty-five minutes, or know the reason," she told herself sternly, and going to her room she posted a "busy" sign on the door as a gentle hint that visitors were not desired, and fell to work.