B1037 <=> B1039 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 1038]

“’What then ought I to have called that quadruped animal if it actually was a bull?’

“’The word,’ said the headmistress, ‘by which you call that animal, any of the scum call it. But you, since you are here in the institute, are not of the scum; so you should always find out how to call indecent things by names which do not sound indecent to the ear.

“’For instance, when you saw that indecent animal and wanted your friend to look at it, you might have shouted, “Mary, look, there goes a beefsteak,” or “Mary, look yonder, there goes something that is very good to eat when we are hungry,” and so forth.’

“From all this poor Elizabeth became so nervous, especially as this ‘reprimanding’ took place in the presence of all her friends, that she could not restrain herself and cried out with all her might:

“’Oh, you wretched old maids! Striped hobgoblins! Spawn of deepest hell! Because I called a thing by its name, you immediately begin to suck my blood. Be thrice damned!!!!!’

“Having said these last words, she fell as they say there ‘in a faint,’ followed in turn by the fainting of the headmistress herself and of several ‘class mistresses’ and ‘governesses.’

“The ‘class mistresses’ and ‘governesses’ of this ‘genteel institution’ who had not fainted then raised such a ‘hubbub’ as really only occurs at what is called the market where ‘Jewesses’ from the town of Berdichev exclusively bargain.

“The result of it all was that when the ‘class mistresses’ and ‘governesses’ who had fainted, revived, they then and there held in the field under the presidency of this same headmistress of the institution, what is there called a ‘teachers’ council,’ by whose sentence it was decided immediately on return to town to telegraph Elizabeth’s father to come for his daughter, as she was expelled from the institute with loss of right to enter any other similar institute in the Russian Empire.