III
On a certain March afternoon, when it was snowing most unseasonably hard, and the children were drowsy and listless, Miss Prawl dismissed her class early, with instructions to go straight home, and to change their shoes and stockings the minute they got there. On account of the deep, blinding snow, Theodora reluctantly called off the meeting of the See-A-Star Club, and as she plunged home through the biting icy flakes, she mused on the futility of even trying to get a purple star. There was no use in hoping to excel Charley Starr in the matter of ordinary stars, because he was always perfect. Neither he nor she had so far been absent or late, and neither had failed in anything. The only solution, therefore, was to invent some way of being more than perfect.
As the snow continued to fall all night, and was still coming down the next morning, Theodora, besides her usual wraps, wore a pair of shiny, unused rubber boots, a Christmas present from her grandmother, who had always worn rubber boots to school when she was little, and thought that girls ought to now. With a somewhat lumbering gait, Theodora waded to school, and arrived just in time to see Charles Augustus Starr, Junior, being magnificently driven up in a regal sleigh with great accompanying jingling of bells, and waving in the wind of red and yellow plumes. Besides Charley and Theodora, very few of the class were present; and as for chapel—well, it looked desolate and emptily bleak, instead of being hot and crowded as usual.
Miss Prawl went through the lessons rapidly, and at eleven o’clock, Mr. Wadsmore put his head in the door, and said that school must be dismissed at once. There was a high gale, and the children were to go home as quickly as they could get there.
The next morning, the snowstorm had become a blizzard, a dangerous monster of a blizzard, in fact the one great historic blizzard—the blizzard of 1888. And the milkman left no milk at Theodora’s house that morning. And the rooms were so dark that all the gas in the house had to be lit. And the choreman couldn’t come to fix the furnace, and the fire went out. Everything was cold, shivery, and unreal. Outside, the great banks of snow were impenetrable. From the downstairs rooms, you couldn’t have seen people on the other side of the street—supposing that there had been any people to see. A policeman went by on a floundering horse, but there were no wagons, and there was nobody walking—no red-faced jocose postman, no iceman, no sedate business men, no scurrying, scampering children.
As she pulled on her rubber boots, Theodora, who always planned to get to school before the doors were opened, decided to allow ten minutes extra that morning. At exactly half-past eight, the Scotch janitor always took down the big bar which held the double doors in place, and Theodora was invariably the first one in. It was not necessary for her to get there until ten minutes of nine, but she never ran the slightest risk of being tardy. In all her life, she had never been tardy or absent.
'Don’t worry about me, mother, if I’m late to luncheon,' said Theodora, as she appeared in the dining-room door. 'It’s so snowy that it will take me longer than usual.'
'Theodora, child,' remonstrated Mrs. Bowles, 'surely you don’t think that I’m going to allow you to go to school?'
'Why, yes, mother,' said Theodora, with horrible misgiving none the less.
'You couldn’t get there alive,' declared her mother. 'There’s no one on the street. It would be positively suicidal.'