Select the correct text in the passage. Which statement from the passage best supports the idea that Penrod does not want to be in the children's play?
excerpt from Penrod
by Booth Tarkington
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude,
that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be
inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay
hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has learned this, and Penrod was habitually as fathomless as the depth of
his hatred this morning for the literary activities of Mrs. Lora Rewbush-an almost universally respected fellow citizen, a lady of charitable and
poetic inclinations, and one of his own mother's most intimate friends.
Mrs. Laura Rewbush had written something which she called "The Children's Pageant of the Table Round," and it was to be performed in public
that very afternoon at the Women's Arts and Guild Hall. And if any flavor of sweetness remained in the nature of Penrod Schofield after the
dismal trials of the school week just past, that problematic, infinitesimal remnant was made pungent acid by the imminence of his destiny to
form a prominent feature of this spectacle, and to declaim the loathsome sentiments of character named upon the program the Child Sir
Lancelot.
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