Outburst in the lesson room
That buoyancy had well evaporated by Monday afternoon, when I had my next lesson with Rachel. We were going over new vocabulary words, which anymore had hardly anything to do with business or a ledger book: “portend,” and “cautious,” “truculent,” and “sumptuous,” and “cataclysm.” After we had gone over these words, both pronunciation and definition, she asked me to use each one in a sentence. I thought a minute, and then rolled them all together in a single sentence: “The cautious Mr. Jefferson has agreed to meet with the truculent Dr. Sharp, which portends some cataclysm, I fear, but which might yield up sumptuous rewards, if I can survive it with tailfeathers intact.”
“Tailfeathers?”
I told her of Virgil’s estimation, that the confrontation between the two
