Adelina obeyed the rules, attended recitations, was respectful to her teachers and amiable toward her schoolmates. If she spent her recreation hours in memorising poetry and drama, or spouting scenes from her favourite plays, the proceedings could hardly be labelled misdemeanors. To be sure, she broke considerable bedroom crockery in the course of strenuous scenes, and in one of her famous death falls she dislodged plaster on the ceiling of the room below, but she cheerfully provided new crockery and paid for ceiling repairs, so Miss Ryder's censure, though earnest and emphatic, was not over-severe. Belinda's English literature class became popular to an unusual degree, and its sessions were diverting rather than academic. In this class only did Adelina take a fervid interest. The midwinter semester was being devoted to consideration of Elizabethan drama, and in the Shakespearian readings, recitations and discussions which were a feature of the study the Cayuga County genius played a star rôle. The other girls might search out and memorise the shortest possible quotations--Adelina absorbed whole scenes, entire acts, and ranted through them with fine frenzy, until stopped in full career by the teacher's stern command. With folded arms and frowning brow she rendered Hamlet's soliloquy. She gave a version of Ophelia that proved beyond question that luckless heroine's fitness for a padded cell. She frisked through Rosalind's coquetries like a gamesome calf, and kept Lady Macbeth's vigils with groans and sighs and shuddering horrors. Only by constantly snuffing her out could the Youngest Teacher maintain anything like order in the class; and, as it was, the enjoyment of Adelina's classmates often verged upon hysteria. As for the Gifted One's own honest pride and satisfaction in her prowess, words cannot do justice to it, and it would have been pathetic had it not been so amusing. But it was in her own room that Adelina was at her best. There she rendered with wild intensity scenes from a score of plays, and there the girls resorted during their leisure hours, in full certainty of prodigal entertainment. In one of the trunks brought from home Langtry's counterpart had a choice assortment of costumes, constructed chiefly from cheesecloth and cotton flannel, but reënforced by tinsel paper, beads, swan's-down and other essentials for regal rôles. There were artificial flowers, too, among the supplies, and a make-up box--jealously guarded from the notice of a faculty prone to narrow prejudices--was used by the tragédienne with wonderful and fearful results. Adelina did not--intentionally--lean toward comedy. Tragedy was her sphere. She loved to shiver, and shudder, and groan, and shriek, and swoon, and die violent deaths; and although she admitted, as all true artists must, the claims of Shakespeare, she, in her secret soul, considered Sardou the immortal William's superior.