happen, the ensuing uproar inside the Fraternity would have blown the
roof off Literates' Hall. Even Lancedale couldn't have survived such
an explosion, and the body of Literate First Class Ralph N. Prestonby
would have been found in a vacant lot the next morning. Even many of
Lancedale's supporters would have turned on him in anger at this
sudden blow to the Fraternities' monopoly of the printed Word.

So it had to be kept secret, and since adolescents in possession of a
secret are under constant temptation to hint mysteriously in the
presence of outsiders, this hocus-pocus of ritual and password and
countersign had to be resorted to. He'd been in conspiratorial work of
other kinds, and knew that there was a sound psychological basis for
most of what seemed, at first glance, to be mere melodramatic
claptrap.

He and Yetsko passed on through a door across the room, into another
sound-proofed room. The work of soundproofing and partitioning the old
stockroom had been done in the last semester of his first year at
Mineola High, by members of the graduating class of building-trades
students, who had then gone their several ways convinced that they had
been working on a set of music-class practice rooms. The Board of
Education had never even found out about it. In this second room, a
Literate teacher, one of the Lancedale faction, had a reading class of
twenty-five or thirty. A girl was on her feet, with a book in her
hand, reading from it:

"We are not sure of sorrow;
And joy was never sure;
Today will die tomorrow;
Time stoops to no man's lure;