The Madigans | Page 3

toward the sensitive-plant in the window.
"Not there! That poor plant seems to suffer sympathetically with your
badness. Stand over by the bureau."
Sissy obeyed. Her rage at being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage

that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her
knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into
dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man
might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had
been mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made
commandments.
She was standing with her nose pressed firmly against the green
wall-paper, her back laid open as by a surgical operation, and a towel,
which her aunt had forced into the aperture for drying purposes,
dangling down behind, when Kate, passing the door on her way to
breakfast, glanced in.
Her sputtering, quickly stifled screech of laughter sent Sissy spinning
about as a bull does when the banderilla is planted in his quivering
flesh. She looked at the doorway; it was empty, but she heard scurrying
footsteps without. Kate was on her way to tell the others.
She looked at Aunt Anne. That severe lady had dropped her book and,
seized by the contagion, was shaking with silent laughter.
Not a word did Sissy say. Her expression of disgust,--disgust that a
grown-up should be so silly as to see something funny in absolutely
nothing; disgust that her aunt should so weaken the effect of her own
discipline,--reinforced by the green smudge on her nose, rubbed off the
wall-paper, finished Miss Madigan. The lady no longer attempted to
conceal the disgraceful fact that she was laughing. She gave an audible
gurgle, and began to wipe the tears of enjoyment from her eyes.
In that moment the iron entered into Sissy Madigan's soul. She turned
again to the wall, and taking a pin which had fastened the bow of
ribbon at her throat, she pricked slowly but relentlessly in the loose
wall-paper this legend:
AUNT ANNE--PIG
After which she felt relieved, and, the five minutes being up, left the
room with such uncompromising hauteur, still splashed with green on

the nose, still split open down the back, with the towel's fringe dangling
in dignity behind, that her aunt again exploded.
[Illustration: "Left the room with such uncompromising hauteur ... that
her aunt again exploded"]
The fact that she had irretrievably lost one credit through tardiness set
Sissy's lips in a tight line of determination to guard jealously every one
of the ninety-and-nine left to her.
At recess she remained at her desk studying her geography with an
intensity of purpose that made her rivals' hearts quake. She sat at the
teacher's desk--lifted to this almost regal eminence by his fondness for
her petulant ways as well as because of that quality of leadership which
made Sissy her fellows' spokeswoman. Hers was the privilege of using
the master's pencils, sharpened to a fineness that made neatness a
dissipation instead of a task. It was she, of course, who originated the
decorative style of arithmetic-paper much in vogue, on which each
example was penned off in an inclosure fenced by alternating vertical
and horizontal double hyphens.
But a queer, conscientious sense of the responsibilities of power and
place modified Sissy's rapturous delight in her position, so that she kept
it despite a fiercely jealous class-spirit developed by a strict
credit-system, by the emulative temper which the rarefied atmosphere
of the little mining town fostered, and by a young master just out of
college who looked upon his teaching as a temporary adventure, much
as a Japanese gentleman regards domestic service.
It was in her capacity of class representative that the master had
consulted Sissy upon the limits to be observed in the forthcoming
public oral examination in geography. And she had enlightened him as
to what would be considered quite "fair." This treaty, into which she
entered with the seriousness of an ambassador to an unfriendly power
arranging a settlement of a disputed question, had a character so sacred
in her eyes that its violation by the master in the course of the afternoon
came upon her like a blow.

"Cecilia Madigan," asked the master, "what is the highest mountain in
the world?"
Sissy rose. The imposing array of visitors in school faded out of her
horizon. All she could see was the eyes of her schoolmates turned in
accusatory horror upon her. They suspected her of betraying them; of
using her elevated position to hand down untrustworthy information.
"Please, Mr. Garvan," she said in tones more of sorrow than of anger,
skilfully showing her knowledge of the answer while denying his right
to it, "that question isn't on the map of Africa."
[Illustration: "'Please, Mr. Garvan,' she said"]
A