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Madeline Ayres lounged comfortably on the back row and watched her companions struggling to express their opinions on “the topic previously assigned.” It happened to be the characteristics of Matthew Arnold. Madeline had exhausted the subject in five illegible lines, written in half as many minutes. She folded and signed her paper, and leaned forward to see how the girls on the row in front of her were progressing. Babe was chewing her pencil busily. Helen Adams was on her second page and—yes, she had actually divided her work into paragraphs! Madeline shrugged her shoulders, in token of her scorn for such foolishness, and looked at the clock. Then she glanced at the platform where Dr. Eaton sat, wearing his cold, slightly bored expression, and not showing the slightest interest in the spectacle before him.

Madeline Ayres differed from the majority in finding Dr. Eaton dull. His blasé air irritated, instead of interesting her, and she longed to startle him out of it, in spite of himself. Now she would try to do it. Lazily she reached out a long arm for the sheet of paper which Helen Adams had been hoarding against a possible emergency, and meeting Helen’s glance of protest with a pathetically beseeching gesture, she went to work again, as if her life depended upon filling that sheet before the gong struck.