Bat Author:Edward Marshall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV IT had been with delight that she considered it, but it was with fear and trembling that Bat actually went to grammar-school, and it was with wrath... more » at the sad handicaps which had afflicted her that she discovered how much "under-grade" she really was. The examinations automatically placed her with much younger children. It was humiliating. "Perdue," she exclaimed, when he came home the night after her first day, "I never can! I never can! I never can!" "What, Bat?" "Endure the horror of that school! I simply don't know anything and what I do know I know wrong!" "It isn't quite as bad as that, I guess." "Oh, worse! Much worse! They've got me in the baby-carriage classes, mostly, and I'm 'way below the average in them." For a moment he feared greatly that she was about to weep, but, instead, she stood back from him, stamped her foot a little, shook her head (which sent her aureole of hair into delightful fluffiness about her flushed and agitated face) and swore she'd never go to school another day, not if wild horses, lashed to fury, were hitched to her to drag her there. Then: "Do you know what I mean by that, Perdue?" He shook his head in rueful disappointment. "You seem to mean that you won't go to school," he ventured, somewhat timidly. "That shows how much you know!" she scorned. "You're not wise to girls, Perdue. What I mean by that is that I'll go to-morrow morning, and go every other morning of the week except Saturdays and Sundays, and that the only reason that I won't go then will be that there won't be school, on those days, to be gone to. And another thing Imean by that is that I'll make 'em sorry that they sniffed at me. I will, I will, I Will! I'll make 'em sniff out of their ears!" He laughed, which was an error, for she das...« less