"Take your things," said she; "I won't have you in this room another minute." Patrick's eyes grew large, he hesitated about returning to the paternal and official roof-tree with the tidings that he had been expelled. "Take your hat and everything you own and come with me."
Patrick gathered together a miscellaneous collection, consisting of a wad of chewing-gum, the soul of a mouth-organ, a cap, and one rubber overshoe, and prepared to march upon East Broadway.
"You are a disgrace to the school," said Miss Blake loftily, "and I am going to take you to the only place you are fit for--back to the First Reader Class. We'll see what Miss Bailey will say to you, young man."
Well, Patrick followed her. It was the first command of hers to which he had given favorable ear. He even went with alacrity--and the novices in the Second Reader gazed wildly upon one another. They may not have been quick to memorize incomprehensible and unexplained "memory gems," or to carry in their heads long strings of figures unconnected with anything in sea or sky. But Miss Bailey's training had made them experts in recognizing cause and effect, and such an epidemic of lawlessness and mischief swept over Room 19 as even Miss Blake's ten years' experience had never paralleled. "Bailey's Babies" went suddenly and unanimously to the dogs. The energy which they had expended in being "'moted" was as nothing to the delirious determination with which they fought for retrogradation. They dutifully called to mind all Miss Bailey's precepts, and then crashed through them, one by one. They fell from grace, from truth, from cleanliness, from all the moral heights upon which Teacher had perched them, and, as they fell, they set in motion the machinery provided by the Board of Education. Mesdames Gonorowsky, Mowgelewsky and Borrachsohn, and other matrons began to find the tenor of their days interrupted by incomprehensible post-cards, and a regrettably comprehensible Truant Officer. "Bailey's Babies" were running amuck, and their cries as they committed moral hara-kiri echoed as far as the marble halls of the Board of Education on remote Park Avenue.
Mrs. Gonorowsky paid the exorbitant price of a cent to have her official postcard read by an interpreter. Neighbors volunteered for this service, but she would have none of them. She wanted an authoritative reading, and having got it, she sat down to await the return of Eva.