If there is anything
horrid that an examination DIDn't do to Elizabeth Ann, I have yet to
hear of it. It began years ago, before ever she went to school, when she
heard Aunt Frances talking about how SHE had dreaded examinations when
she was a child, and how they dried up her mouth and made her ears ring
and her head ache and her knees get all weak and her mind a perfect
blank, so that she didn't know what two and two made. Of course
Elizabeth Ann didn't feel ALL those things right off at her first
examination, but by the time she had had several and had rushed to tell
Aunt Frances about how awful they were and the two of them had
sympathized with one another and compared symptoms and then wept about
her resulting low marks, why, she not only had all the symptoms Aunt
Frances had ever had, but a good many more of her own invention.
Well, she had had them all and had them hard this afternoon, when the
Superintendent was there. Her mouth had gone dry and her knees had
shaken and her elbows had felt as though they had no more bones in them
than so much jelly, and her eyes had smarted, and oh, what answers she
had made! That dreadful tight panic had clutched at her throat whenever
the Superintendent had looked at her, and she had disgraced herself ten
times over. She went hot and cold to think of it, and felt quite sick
with hurt vanity. She who did so well every day and was so much looked
up to by her classmates, what MUST they be thinking of her! To tell the
truth, she had been crying as she walked along through the woods,
because she was so sorry for herself.
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