ila knelt there waiting and
waiting for the question to be passed on to me. I shook my head as
vigorously as I dared, but nobody paid any attention. Lila waited and
waited; the instructor waited; everybody waited and waited, till Lila's
knees ached so that she lifted her face and peeked. She peeked straight
into those grim waiting eyes on the platform.

Then the instructor said, "Miss Allan?" with the usual dreadful
interrogative inflection, and Lila shook her head. She slid back into her
seat with her cheeks as red as fire.

The minute we escaped into the hall at the end of the recitation, the
girls gathered around us and giggled and teased Lila till she almost
broke down and cried before them all. There is a lot of difference
between playing jokes on another person and appearing ridiculous
yourself. The first few weeks of the year we had teased Martha by telling
her it was etiquette for freshmen to rise when addressed by sophomores
and stuff like that. The little thing was so unsophisticated that we made
up yards and yards of stories about the dangers of going walking alone or
being out after dusk. One student really did have her purse snatched last
year, and a senior saw a masked robber in the pines, and once a maid
caught a glimpse of a face outside her window, and actually one evening
six of us beheld with our own eyes a man jump through the hedge.

On this particular morning I had no time to waste, for my tutor in
mathematics had warned me that she intended to charge me for the hour for
which I had engaged her, no matter whether I arrived on the scene or not.
That struck me as queer and rather mean, because on some days I did not
feel like going, and I failed to see why I should pay her for tutoring
that I had not received. She said that her time was valuable and an hour
squandered in waiting for a delinquent pupil was so much loss. I guess it
was a loss to me too.

While I was flying around, trying to find my notes and pen, I heard a
gulp and a sob from Martha's bedroom, and popped in to find her with her
head buried in the pillow. The little idiot was crying because she had
flunked in English.

"Oh, but English is so easy to bluff in!" I exclaimed, "almost any string
of words will do if the teacher asks for a discussion of a tendency or of
nature or vocabulary or poetic form or something. Didn't you make a try
at some sort of an answer?"

"I said I didn't know," sobbed Martha, "and I didn't. My thoughts we