A tempest of paper-wads, badinage and giggles greeted her. The teacher's desk was vacant. Miss Smith was at home sick, and the principal had put Mathematics III A on their honour. For a time Missy joined in their honourable pursuit of giggles and badinage. But Raymond had welcomed her as if the fun must mount to something yet higher when she came; she felt a “secret, deep, interior urge” to show what she could do. The seductive May air stole into her blood, a stealthy, intoxicating elixir, and finally the Inspiration came, with such tumultuous swiftness that she could never have told whence or how. Passed on to her fellows, it was caught up with an ardour equally mad and unreckoning. One minute the unpastored flock of Mathematics III A were leaning out the windows, sniffing in the lilac scents wafted over from Mrs. Clifton's yard; the next they were scurrying, tip-toe, flushed, laughing, jostling, breathless, out through the cloak-room, down the stairs, through the side-door, across the stretch of school-yard, toward a haven beyond Mrs. Clifton's lilac hedge.
Where were they going? They did not know. Why had they started? They did not know. What the next step? They did not know. No thought nor reason in that, onward rush; only one vast, enveloping, incoherent, tumultuous impulse--away! away! Away from dark walls into the open; away from the old into the new; away from the usual into the you-don't-know-what; away from “you must not” into “you may.” The wild, free, bright, heedless urge of Spring!
Behind their fragrant rampart they paused, for a second, to spin about in a kind of mental and spiritual whirlpool. Some began breaking off floral sprays to decorate hat-band or shirt-waist. But Missy, feeling her responsibility as a leader, glanced back, through leafy crevices, at those prison-windows open and ominously near.
“We mustn't stay here!” she admonished. “We'll get caught!”
As if an embodiment of warning, just then Mrs. Clifton emerged out on her front porch; she looked as if she might be going to shout at them. But Raymond waited to break off a lilac cluster for Missy. He was so cool about it; it just showed how much he was like the Black Prince--though of course no one would “understand” if you said such a thing.