Read The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell for Free Online Page B

were the so-called promiscuous figures, more complicated maneuvers in which partners switched for a portion of the dance.
    On Monday and Wednesday I had nine students, four boys and five girls, ages twelve to fifteen. On Tuesday and Thursday I had seven young ladies. Four of them—Sarah Clemson, Jane Brower, and the Blackstone twins—were age sixteen and from the upper village of Honesdale. Dorothy Millen, Evelyn Sanders, and Lydia Watson were a year or two older and from the village of Bethany. The girls in my older class constantly exchanged looks and whispered to each other. I ignored it, though at times I felt excluded, as though I were back at school. And did they really believe I was a man? That thought continued to astonish me. It seemed that they did, but how long would they? After all, they looked and smelled like girls to me. How did I look and smell to them?
    I had expected my younger students to be the more difficult to teach. They weren’t. They listened and did what they were told. My older girls were the ones who bridled. They sighed and put on bored expressions, making it clear that they were oppressed by the dreariness of the province. I had little patience for it.
    “Are you too good for this?” I asked one afternoon. The silence said I was close to the truth. “Would you prefer the society of Baltimore?”
    Miss Millen glanced about nervously. “I just don’t want to dance like my grandmother.”
    “We would like to learn the waltz,” said Miss Watson.
    “And the mazurka,” said Miss Sanders.
    I held back a smile. I had planned all along to teach the waltz, but now I thought to use it as a carrot. “Very well,” I said, as though a bargain were being struck. “I will teach you the waltz. And the mazurka too, perhaps. But only after you show me that you have mastered the quadrille.”
    The girls brightened, and the next few lessons went quite well. Even so, during our recesses, the Bethany girls would go off by themselves, and in observing them, I noticed a curiosity. In years past, I had sometimes heard young women variously compared to dolls, angels, or fillies. I had thought the imagery insipid, if not insulting. Why couldn’t they just be young women? But now, oddly, I began to do the very same thing, at least in my thoughts. Plain and round, Evelyn Sanders was a stuffed doll that one would hug at night till the seams gave out. With skin you could see through and hair the color of wheat, Dorothy Millen was a porcelain figure with folded wings, something you would set upon a shelf. And Lydia Watson, with her sturdy frame, dark skin, and long brown hair? She was a horse running loose in a field.
     
    * * *
    While reading the Democrat one morning at Blandin’s, I came across a notice placed by the Young Men’s Literary Society. It was for a lecture titled “Bleeding Kansas” to be given at the Cornell Hall that evening. I decided to go, wishing to hear a man of the world speak on a public issue, an experience that had not been mine before.
    I arrived late so I could stand out of view at the back. It was a warm night for May, and the hall was dense with smoke and the strong odor of men’s bodies. I couldn’t see the speaker, but his voice was clear. “Now we have all heard it referred to as popular sovereignty . Sounds most upright, does it not? But what do we call it when men from Missouri cross over to murder and pillage those who have settled the Kansas land with the idea of freedom? Popular sovereignty? No! Call it by its real name. Popular thuggery !”
    The room exploded with cheers. When the speech was done, men went this way and that, as those wishing to exchange greetings with the speaker had to push past those trying to leave. As I waited for things to sort out, a gentleman in a tailored waistcoat came up to me. “I am Kenneth Burton,” he said with a slight bow, “former chairman of this august organization, now demoted to the reception of new members. My friends and