Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/62

 "And you may remain half an hour after school. The A-class, ready for geography!"

Thus lightly did our ruler turn from tragedy to comedy. For tragedy, there was the look my queen lavished upon Solon when she heard his sentence; a look of blushing merriment, with a maddening dash of pity in it,—he was to suffer because of her. "'Twas your beauty made me do it," he might have quoted, with the old result. How I longed for the jaunty lightness that would have let me do a thing like that, tossing me fairly to the pinnacle of a public association with her! But I, instead, moped alone, knowing well that the gifts of graceful brigandage were not mine. Had I snatched that ribbon, there had been tears and a mad outcry at my brutal roughness.

Now came the lesson in geography. I had known it, had studied it faithfully that morning. It treated of the state from which she had so lately come. But now all knowledge of it fled me save that on the map it was a large, clumsy state, though yellow, the color of her hair. Was it to be bounded like any cheaper state? Did it have principal products, like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and other ordinary states? Its color was rightly golden; had it not produced her? but other products,—iron, coal, wheat,—these were stuffs too base to fellow in the same mind with her. Had it principal industries, like any red or green or blue state on that pedantic map? I could no longer recall them. Formally confronted with this problem,