Conspicuously
and unmistakably, there was something indulgent in her amusement. He
choked. Here was a little squirt of a high-school girl who would trot
up to George Washington himself and show off around him, given the
opportunity; and George Washington would probably pat her on the head,
or give her a medal--or something. Well, let him! Ramsey didn't care.
He didn't care for George Washington, or Paul Revere, or Shakespeare, or
any of 'em. They could all go to the dickens with Dora Yocum. They were
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.
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