 day of such
excitement.
 

                                   Chapter XV

                               The Long Vacation

Following Madame Beck's fête, with its three preceding weeks of relaxation, its
brief twelve hours' burst of hilarity and dissipation, and its one subsequent
day of utter languor, came a period of reaction; two months of real application,
of close, hard study. These two months, being the last of the année scolaire,
were indeed the only genuine working months in the year. To them was
procrastinated - into them concentrated, alike by professors, mistresses, and
pupils - the main burden of preparation for the examinations preceding the
distribution of prizes. Candidates for rewards had then to work in good earnest;
masters and teachers had to set their shoulders to the wheel, to urge on the
backward, and diligently aid and train the more promising. A showy demonstration
- a telling exhibition - must be got up for public view, and all means were fair
to this end.
    I scarcely noted how the other teachers went to work; I had my own business
to mind: and my task was not the least onerous, being to embue some ninety sets
of brains with a due tincture of what they considered a most complicated and
difficult science, that of the English language; and to drill ninety tongues in
what, for them, was an almost impossible pronounciation - the lisping and
hissing dentals of the isles.
    The examination-day arrived. Awful day! Prepared for with anxious care,
dressed for with silent despatch - nothing vaporous or fluttering now - no white
gauze or azure streamers; the grave, close, compact was the order of the
toilette. It seemed to me that I was this day especially doomed - the main
burden and trial falling on me alone of all the female teachers. The others were
not expected to examine in the studies they taught; the professor of literature,
M. Paul, taking upon himself this duty. He, this school-autocrat, gathered all
and sundry reins into the hollow of his one hand; he irefully rejected any
colleague; he would not have help. Madame herself, who evidently rather wished
to undertake the examination in geography - her favourite study, which she
taught well - was forced to succumb, and be subordinate to her despotic
kinsman's direction. The whole staff of instructors, male and female, he set
aside, and stood on the examiner's estrade alone. It irked him that he was
forced to make one exception to this rule. He could not manage English: he was
obliged to leave that branch of education in the English teacher's hands; which
