“Well—but—we——”
“You have never before been uncharitable,” smiled Mrs. Pangborn. “Try and bear patiently with Miss Olaine. If you knew all about her you would pity her condition, I am sure. No! I cannot tell you. It is not my secret, my dear. But try to understand her better—and do, Dorothy, keep Tavia within bounds!”
The principal knew that this line of pleading would win over Dorothy Dale every time!
CHAPTER IX
AN EXPEDITION AFOOT
“Yes,” said Miss Olaine, who became deeply interested when she thought she had the attention of her class, and the matter under discussion was one that appealed particularly to herself. “What we want in literature is direct and simple English.
“I wish you young ladies to mark this: Epigrams, or flowers of rhetoric, or so-called ‘fine writing,’ does not mark scholarship. The better understanding one has of words and their meanings, the more simply thought may be expressed.
“Do you attend me?” she added, sharply, staring straight at Tavia. “Then to-morrow each of you bring me, expressed in her own language upon paper, her consideration of what simple English means.”
And Tavia received another “condition” for presenting and reading aloud to the class, as requested, the following:
“Those conglomerated effusions of vapid intellects, which posed in lamented attitudes as the emotional and intellectual ingredients of fictional realism, fall far short of the obvious requirements of contemporary demands and violate the traditional models of the transcendent minds of the Elizabethan era of glorious memory.”