Ramsey Milholland | Page 5

stooped to do so, but was
not permitted. Miss Ridgely tried to stimulate him with hints and
suggestion; found him, so far as decimals went, mere protoplasm, and,
wondering how so helpless a thing could live, summoned to the board
little Dora Yocum, the star of the class, whereupon Ramsey moved
toward his seat.

"Stand still, Ramsey! You stay right where you are and try to learn
something from the way Dora does it."
The class giggled, and Ramsey stood, but learned nothing. His
conspicuousness was unendurable, because all of his schoolmates
naturally found more entertainment in watching him than in following
the performance of the capable Dora. He put his hands in and out of his
pockets; was bidden to hold them still, also not to shuffle his feet; and
when in a false assumption of ease he would have scratched his head
Miss Ridgely's severity increased, so that he was compelled to give
over the attempt.
Instructed to watch every figure chalked up by the mathematical
wonder, his eyes, grown sodden, were unable to remove themselves
from the part in her hair at the back of her head, where two little braids
began their separate careers to end in a couple of blue-and-red checked
bits of ribbon, one upon each of her thin shoulder blades. He was
conscious that the part in Dora's shining brown hair was odious, but he
was unconscious of anything arithmetical. His sensations clogged his
intellect; he suffered from unsought notoriety, and hated Dora Yocum;
most of all he hated her busy little shoulder blades.
He had to be "kept in" after school; and when he was allowed to go
home he averted his eyes as he went by the house where Dora lived.
She was out in the yard, eating a doughnut, and he knew it; but he had
passed the age when it is just as permissible to throw a rock at a girl as
at a boy; and stifling his normal inclinations, he walked sturdily on,
though he indulged himself so far as to engage in a murmured
conversation with one of the familiar spirits dwelling somewhere
within him. "Pfa!" said Ramsey to himself--or himself to Ramsey, since
it is difficult to say which was which. "Pfa! Thinks she's smart, don't
she?"... "Well, I guess she does, but she ain't!" ... "I hate her, don't
you?"... "You bet your life I hate her!"... "Teacher's Pet, that's what I
call her!"... "Well, that's what I call her, too, don't I?" "Well, I do; that's
all she is, anyway--dirty ole Teacher's Pet!"
Chapter III

He had not forgiven her four years later when he entered high school in
her company, for somehow Ramsey managed to shovel his way
through examinations and stayed with the class. By this time he had a
long accumulation of reasons for hating her: Dora's persistent and
increasing competency was not short of flamboyant, and teachers
naturally got the habit of flinging their quickest pupil in the face of
their slowest and "dumbest." Nevertheless, Ramsey was unable to deny
that she had become less awful lookin' than she used to be. At least, he
was honest enough to make a partial retraction when his friend and
classmate, Fred Mitchell, insisted that an amelioration of Dora's
appearance could be actually proven.
"Well, I'll take it back. I don't claim she's every last bit as awful lookin'
as she always has been," said Ramsey, toward the conclusion of the
argument. "I'll say this for her, she's awful lookin', but she may not be
as awful lookin' as she was. She don't come to school with the edge of
some of her underclo'es showin' below her dress any more, about every
other day, and her eyewinkers have got to stickin' out some, and she
may not be so abbasalootly skinny, but she'll haf to wait a mighty long
while before I want to look at her without gettin' sick!"
The implication that Miss Yocum cared to have Ramsey look at her,
either with or without gettin' sick, was mere rhetoric, and recognized as
such by the producer of it; she had never given the slightest evidence of
any desire that his gaze be bent upon her. What truth lay underneath his
flourish rested upon the fact that he could not look at her without some
symptoms of the sort he had tersely sketched to his friend; and yet, so
pungent is the fascination of self-inflicted misery, he did look at her,
during periods of study, often for three or four minutes at a stretch. His
expression at such times indeed resembled that of one who has dined
unwisely; but Dora Yocum was always too eagerly busy to notice it. He
was almost never in her eye, but she was continually in his; moreover,
as