The Quimbys said very little at breakfast the next morning. Beezus was moody and silent. Mrs. Quimby, in her white uniform, was in a hurry to leave for work. Picky-picky resentfully ate a few bites of Puss-puddy. Mr. Quimby did not say, “I told you he would eat it when he was really hungry,” but the whole family was thinking it. He might as well have said it.

Ramona wished her family would cheer up. When they had finished eating, she found herself alone with her father.

“Bring me an ashtray, please,” said Mr. Quimby. “That’s a good girl.”

Reluctantly Ramona brought the ashtray and, with her face rigid with disapproval, watched her father light his after-breakfast cigarette.

“Why so solemn?” he asked as he shook out the flame of the match.

“Is it true what Beezus said?” Ramona demanded.

“About what?” asked Mr. Quimby.

Ramona had a feeling her father really knew what she meant. “About smoking will make your lungs turn black,” she answered.

Mr. Quimby blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “I expect to be one of those old men with a long gray beard who has his picture in the paper on his hundredth birthday and who tells reporters he owes his long life to cigarettes and whiskey.”

Ramona was not amused. “Daddy”—her voice was stern—“you are just being silly again.”

Her father took a deep breath and blew three smoke rings across the table, a most unsatisfactory answer to Ramona.

On the way to school Ramona cut across the lawn for the pleasure of leaving footprints in the dew and then did not bother to look back to see where she had walked. Instead of running or skipping, she trudged. Nothing was much fun anymore when her family quarreled and then was silent at breakfast and her father’s lungs were turning black from smoke.

Even though Mrs. Rogers announced, “Today our second grade is going to have fun learning,” as she wrote the date on the black-board, school turned out to be dreary because the class was having Review again. Review meant boredom for some, like Ramona, because they had to repeat what they already knew, and worry for others, like Davy, because they had to try again what they could not do in the first place. Review was the worst part of school. Ramona passed the morning looking through her workbook for words with double o’s like book and cook. She carefully drew eyebrows over the o’s and dots within, making the o’s look like crossed eyes. Then she drew mouths with the ends turned down under the eyes. When she finished, she had a cross-looking workbook that matched her feelings.