The Infant threw a spoon at her blushing friend, who unexpectedly justified her nickname by dodging it.
“As for the Sphinx,” went on the Infant, happy in the unusual feat of holding the attention of the girls, “the poor Sphinx can’t get married because she never says enough for a man to know whether it’s yes or no. She will just keep on loving her pyramids and cones, and teaching algebraic riddles, until she dies. Knowledge will always look so dignified that she will frighten men away. Father exclaimed to me, when he met her, ‘What a lovely, calm, classical face!’ I said, ‘Yes, that is our Knowledge all over.’ And you can imagine how I felt when she opened those dignified lips of hers and remarked conversationally, ‘Say! Isn’t it hot as hot?’”
The girls laughed at poor Knowledge, and the cruel Infant continued to read the future.
“Well, all of us will get presentation copies of Bab’s great work, even I, who will be making home happy ‘if no one comes to marry me’”—
“‘And I don’t see why they should,’” finished Barbara, cuttingly. She rapped the Inspired Soothsayer on her fluffy head with a curtain-rod.
“Your mind runs on matrimony to a disgusting extent, Infant,” she warned. “I shall never marry unless I can carry on my writing.”
“And be a second Mrs. Jellyby?” inquired her friend. “All right; I’ll come to live with you and keep the little Jellybys out of the gravy while you unveil the characters of some Horace and Viola to the admiring world. Oh, girls! The fudge is gone, and it’s twelve o’clock, and even my eyelids will not stay apart much longer.”
The girls rose slowly from their improvised chairs, and stood together, half-unconsciously taking note of the dear, familiar room in its dismantled, unfamiliar condition. Out in the corridor a few unseen classmates began to sing,
“Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus—”