all a lot of smarties anyway and he hated the whole stew of 'em!

There was one, however, whom he somehow couldn't manage to hate, even
though this one officially seemed to be as intimately associated with
Dora Yocum and superiority as the others were. Ramsey couldn't hate
Abraham Lincoln, even when Dora was chosen to deliver the "Gettysburg
Address" on the twelfth of February. Vaguely, yet reassuringly, Ramsey
felt that Lincoln had resisted adoption by the intellectuals. Lincoln
had said "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," and
that didn't mean government by the teacher and the Teacher's Pet
and Paul Revere and Shakespeare and suchlike; it meant government by
everybody, and therefore Ramsey had as much to do with it as anybody
else had. This was friendly; and he believed that if Abraham Lincoln
could have walked into the schoolroom, Lincoln would have been as
friendly with him as with Dora and the teacher herself. Beyond a doubt,
Dora and the teacher _thought_ Lincoln belonged to them and their crowd
of exclusives; they seemed to think they owned the whole United States;
but Ramsey was sure they were mistaken about Abraham Lincoln.

He felt that it was just like this little Yocum snippet to assume such a
thing, and it made him sicker than ever to look at her.

Then, one day, he noticed that her eye-winkers were stickin' out farther
and farther.





Chapter IV