CHAPTER XXI.
THE DESPERATION OF DUM.
Back at Gresham and trying to get into harness! Some of us kicked over the traces, feeling our oats, as it were; and Dum got the bit between her teeth and came very near running all the way home before we could stop her.
It was hard to get into what Mr. Mantilini calls "the demnition grind" after three weeks of untrammeled freedom. The whole school seemed restive and the teachers were not much better than the pupils. Miss Peyton had to drive her coach very carefully. Her infinite tact showed itself constantly. A word of warning here, a slight tightening of the reins there, just a little tap to the ones who seemed inclined to laziness, and soon we were trotting along the road of knowledge just as though we had not been kicking up our heels in the green pastures. All but Dum, she could not get back to work.
"If the year were only half over, but it's only the middle of January now! We've got months and months to wait before we see Zebedee again. When we once get into February, I can stand it better. I can't and won't study, and as for demerits—let 'em give me all they want to. Let 'em put me in bounds. I don't want to go off of the old place. What fun is it to walk down into that dinky little village keeping step like convicts? I'd rather have striped clothes like convicts than these old stupid blue things. There is some variety in stripes but this eternal, and everlasting dark blue—ugh! I hate it!"
"But, Dum," I expostulated, "if you get so many demerits you will not only be in bounds but you'll have to write pages and pages of dictionary."
"I'll see 'em make me. 'You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.' They can tell me to write the dictionary all they want to, but I've yet to see the man, woman, or child who can make me write anything. I just won't and that's an end of it."
"But what will your Father think?" I asked, hoping to get on her better side by appealing to her love for her adored Zebedee.
"Think? 'He can think like young niggers think: buckeyes is biscuit.'"
This made me roar, as it was a saying I had told the twins that Mammy Susan had taught me when I was a child. There was no persuading the headstrong Dum. She had the bit between her teeth and she was rushing straight to destruction. She got zero in her classes during the day, and that night in study hall she spent the time making cunning little brownies out of the colored clay she had brought in her pocket. She did not open a book except for the purpose of propping it up on her desk to conceal the little lifelike figures she was so busy modeling.