Chapter III

On a certain March afternoon, when it was snowing most unseasonably hard, and the children were drowsy and listless, Miss Prawl dismissed her class early, with instructions to go straight home, and to change their shoes and stockings the minute they got there. On account of the deep, blinding snow, Theodora reluctantly called off the meeting of the See-A-Star Club, and as she plunged home through the biting icy flakes, she mused on the futility of even trying to get a purple star. There was no use in hoping to excel Charley Starr in the matter of ordinary stars, because he was always perfect. Neither he nor she had so far been absent or late, and neither had failed in anything. The only solution, therefore, was to invent some way of being more than perfect.

As the snow continued to fall all night, and was still coming down the next morning, Theodora, besides her usual wraps, wore a pair of shiny, unused rubber boots, a Christmas present from her grandmother, who had always worn rubber boots to school when _she_ was little, and thought that girls ought to now. With a somewhat lumbering gait, Theodora waded to school, and arrived just in time to see Charles Augustus Starr, Junior, being magnificently driven up in a regal sleigh with great accompanying jingling of bells, and waving in the wind of red and yellow plumes. Besides Charley and Theodora, very few of the class were present; and as for chapel--well, it looked desolate and emptily bleak, instead of being hot and crowded as usual.

Miss Prawl went through the lessons rapidly, and at eleven o’clock, Mr. Wadsmore put his head in the door, and said that school must be dismissed at once. There was a high gale, and the children were to go home as quickly as they could get there.

The next morning, the snowstorm had become a blizzard, a dangerous monster of a blizzard, in fact the one great historic blizzard--the blizzard of 1888. And the milkman left no milk at Theodora’s house that morning. And the rooms were so dark that all the gas in the house had to be lit. And the choreman couldn’t come to fix the furnace, and the fire went out. Everything was cold, shivery, and unreal. Outside, the great banks of snow were impenetrable. From the downstairs rooms, you couldn’t have seen people on the other side of the street--supposing that there had been any people to see. A policeman went by on a floundering horse, but there were no wagons, and there was nobody walking--no red-faced jocose postman, no iceman, no sedate business men, no scurrying, scampering children.

As she pulled on her rubber boots, Theodora, who always planned to get to school before the doors were opened, decided to allow ten minutes extra that morning. At exactly half-past eight, the Scotch janitor always took down the big bar which held the double doors in place, and Theodora was invariably the first one in. It was not necessary for her to get there until ten minutes of nine, but she never ran the slightest risk of being tardy. In all her life, she had never been tardy or absent.

'Don’t worry about me, mother, if I’m late to luncheon,' said Theodora, as she appeared in the dining-room door. 'It’s so snowy that it will take me longer than usual.'

'Theodora, child,' remonstrated Mrs. Bowles, 'surely you don’t think that I’m going to allow you to go to school?'

'Why, yes, mother,' said Theodora, with horrible misgiving none the less.

'You couldn’t get there alive,' declared her mother. 'There’s no one on the street. It would be positively suicidal.'

Theodora began with tears, and just the usual methods of teasing; then, finding these trusty old friends unavailing, she launched forth into impromptu diplomatic schemes for extracting a 'yes.' She tried to trap her mother by means of a system of cross-questioning, and she endeavored to weary her, until she should impatiently exclaim, 'Oh, for mercy’s sake, _go_!'

But her mother, for once, was relentless. Her father had given up all idea of going to his office, and while Theodora was arguing with her mother, Mr. Bowles went down cellar to build a furnace fire. He very rarely visited the cellar, and when he did, he always returned tremendously upset about something or other. Consequently, Theodora teased in a low voice so that her father shouldn’t hear her through the registers. She hoped to win her mother’s consent and get away before her father wrathfully returned. Mrs. Bowles, however, seemed to get more flinty-hearted every minute. When ten minutes of nine came, and then nine minutes of nine, Theodora realized that never again, in all her life, could she say, 'I have never been tardy.'

She still hoped, however, that some higher power would intervene, and see to it that she got to school at nine. To be tardy was disgraceful enough, but to be absent was a crime that could never be expiated. Suddenly she ran into the library, and knelt rigidly on a rug which she had heard her mother refer to as a 'prayer rug.' And she all but prayed the soul out of her body that the rug would change into a magic carpet on which she could be transported to school. She must have invoked the wrong deity, for the rug did not stir even a hair’s breadth. But perhaps kneeling was not enough; perhaps one ought to lie prone on the rug and pray.

She had just stretched out, full-length, face down, when the hall clock boomed the fatal nine. Now she was both tardy and absent. She was just like any other ordinary human child--she was undistinguished in any way. Well, there was really no use in continuing to live, and oh, for a convenient way to die! How badly her mother and father would feel when they found her stretched dead on the piano bench, and how they would blame themselves for not allowing her to have her way!

Weeping miserably from self-pity, Theodora pulled off her things, and sat down to look out at the storm, and plan her end.

'Come, Pussy, don’t mope!' exclaimed her father. He had just finished a bitter dissertation on the short life of the modern coal-shovel when handled by the choreman of to-day, and was beginning to feel very good-natured again. 'Let’s play backgammon.'

'I’m tardy, and I’m absent!' moaned Theodora, who had about abandoned the idea of dying, in favor of disappearing forever.

'There won’t be any school on such a day as this,' said Mr. Bowles, consolingly. 'Even the teachers couldn’t get there and live.'

This happy suggestion made Theodora decidedly less pensive. Maybe--and oh, how she prayed that it might be so!--_maybe_ her father was right, and maybe, after all, she was still a supreme being--one who had never been tardy or absent. As the day wore on, she became more and more hopeful. Her greatest comfort of all was the thought that Charles Augustus Starr, Junior, who lived over two miles from school, was even more surely a prisoner than herself.

It kept right on snowing that night. There was no discussion about any one’s going out the following day, for the whole city seemed destined to be buried in the snow which fell unceasingly from low, inexhaustible clouds. Finally, after several days, when people were becoming seriously alarmed, and some of them were hungry, the snow stopped, and the sky turned into a dazzling blue from which a blinding sun again looked down on a new white city. And then men began to open their front doors again, and shovel and pant, and pant and shovel, as they dug their way out into the world. Gradually there began to be postmen and butcher-boys and milk-men and horsecars and newspaper-boys and policemen. And when Theodora’s father started for his office, the long-pent-up Theodora was permitted to go to school.