An Unsocial Socialist eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 342 pages of information about An Unsocial Socialist.

An Unsocial Socialist eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 342 pages of information about An Unsocial Socialist.

The year wore on, and the long winter evenings set in.  The studious young ladies at Alton College, elbows on desk and hands over ears, shuddered chillily in fur tippets whilst they loaded their memories with the statements of writers on moral science, or, like men who swim upon corks, reasoned out mathematical problems upon postulates.  Whence it sometimes happened that the more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which few trustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

Agatha, not studious, and apt to shiver in winter, began to break Rule No. 17 with increasing frequency.  Rule No. 17 forbade the students to enter the kitchen, or in any way to disturb the servants in the discharge of their duties.  Agatha broke it because she was fond of making toffee, of eating it, of a good fire, of doing any forbidden thing, and of the admiration with which the servants listened to her ventriloquial and musical feats.  Gertrude accompanied her because she too liked toffee, and because she plumed herself on her condescension to her inferiors.  Jane went because her two friends went, and the spirit of adventure, the force of example, and the love of toffee often brought more volunteers to these expeditions than Agatha thought it safe to enlist.  One evening Miss Wilson, going downstairs alone to her private wine cellar, was arrested near the kitchen by sounds of revelry, and, stopping to listen, overheard the castanet dance (which reminded her of the emphasis with which Agatha had snapped her fingers at Mrs. Miller), the bee on the window pane, “Robin Adair” (encored by the servants), and an imitation of herself in the act of appealing to Jane Carpenter’s better nature to induce her to study for the Cambridge Local.  She waited until the cold and her fear of being discovered spying forced her to creep upstairs, ashamed of having enjoyed a silly entertainment, and of conniving at a breach of the rules rather than face a fresh quarrel with Agatha.

There was one particular in which matters between Agatha and the college discipline did not go on exactly as before.  Although she had formerly supplied a disproportionately large number of the confessions in the fault book, the entry which had nearly led to her expulsion was the last she ever made in it.  Not that her conduct was better—­it was rather the reverse.  Miss Wilson never mentioned the matter, the fault book being sacred from all allusion on her part.  But she saw that though Agatha would not confess her own sins, she still assisted others to unburden their consciences.  The witticisms with which Jane unsuspectingly enlivened the pages of the Recording Angel were conclusive on this point.

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An Unsocial Socialist from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.