It was a day made for poets to sing about. A day for the young man to forget the waiting ledger on his desk and gaze out the window at skies so blue and deep as to invite the building of castles; for even his father to see visions of golf-course or fishing-boat flickering in the translucent air; for old Jeff to get out his lawn-mower and lazily add a metallic song to the hum of the universe. And for him or her who must sit at schoolroom desk, it was a day to follow the processes of blackboard or printed page with the eyes but not the mind, while the encaged spirit beat past the bars of dull routine to wing away in the blue.
Missy, sitting near an open window of the “study room” during the “second period,” let dreamy eyes wander from the fatiguing Q. E. D.'s of the afternoon's Geometry lesson; the ugly tan walls, the sober array of national patriots hanging above the encircling blackboard, the sea of heads restlessly swaying over receding rows of desks, all faded hazily away. Her soul flitted out through the window, and suffused itself in the bit of bright, bright blue showing beyond the stand-pipe, in the soft, soft air that stole in to kiss her cheek, in the elusive fragrance of young, green, growing things, in the drowsy, drowsy sound of Mrs. Clifton's chickens across the way...
Precious minutes were speeding by; she would not have her Geometry lesson. But Missy didn't bring herself back to think of that; would not have cared, anyway. She let her soul stretch out, out, out.
Such is the sweet, subtle, compelling madness a day of Spring can bring one.
Missy had often felt the ecstasy of being swept out on the yearning demand for a new experience. Generally because of something suggestive in “reading” or in heavenly colour combinations or in sad music at twilight; but, now, for no definable reason at all, she felt her soul welling up and up in vague but poignant craving. She asked permission to get a drink of water. But instead of quenching her thirst, she wandered to the entry of the room occupied by Mathematics III A--Missy's own class, from which she was now sequestered by the cruel bar termed “failure-to-pass.” Something was afoot in there; Missy put her ear to the keyhole; then she boldly opened the door.