The Getting of Wisdom

An upper class was taking a lesson in Euclid, and in the intervals between her mazy reckonings she had stolen glances at the master. A tiny little nose was as if squashed flat on his face, above a grotesquely expressive mouth, which displayed every one of a splendid set of teeth. He had small, shortsighted, red-rimmed eyes, and curly hair which did not stop growing at his ears, but went on curling, closely cropped, down the sides of his face. He taught at the top of his voice, thumped the blackboard with a pointer, was biting at the expense of a pupil who confused the angle BFC with the angle BFG, a moment later to volley forth a broad Irish joke which convulsed the class. He bewitched Laura; she forgot her sums in the delight of watching him; and this made her learning seem a little scantier than it actually was; for she had to wind up in a great hurry. He pounced down upon her; the class laughed anew at his playful horror; and yet again at the remark that it was evident she had never had many pennies to spend, or she would know better what to do with the figures that represented them. In these words Laura scented a reference to Mother’s small income, and grew as red as fire.

In the lowest class in the College she sat bottom, for a week or more: what she did know, she knew in such an awkward form that she might as well have known nothing. And after a few efforts to better her condition she grew cautious, and hesitated discreetly before returning one of those ingenuous answers which, in the beginning, had made her the merry-andrew of the class. She could for instance, read a French storybook without skipping very many words; but she had never heard a syllable of the language spoken, and her first attempts at pronunciation caused even Miss Zielinski to sit back in her chair and laugh till the tears ran down her face. History Laura knew in a vague, pictorial way: she and Pin had enacted many a striking scene in the garden⁠—such as “Not Angles but Angels,” or, did the pump-drain overflow, Canute and his silly courtiers⁠—and she also had out-of-the-way scraps of information about the characters of some of the monarchs, or, as the governess had complained, about the state of London at a certain period; but she had never troubled her head with dates. Now they rose before her, a hard, dry, black line from 1066 on, accompanied, not only by the kings who were the cause of them, but by dull laws, and their duller repeals. Her lessons in English alone gave her a mild pleasure; she enjoyed taking a sentence to pieces to see how it was made. She was fond of words, too, for their own sake, and once, when Miss Snodgrass had occasion to use the term “eleemosynary,” Laura was so enchanted by it that she sought to share her enthusiasm with her neighbour. This girl, a fat little Jewess, went crimson, from trying to stifle her laughter.

“What is the matter with you girls down there?” cried Miss Snodgrass. “Carrie Isaacs, what are you laughing like that for?”

“It’s Laura Rambotham, Miss Snodgrass. She’s so funny,” spluttered the girl.

“What are you doing, Laura?”

Laura did not answer. The girl spoke for her.

“She said⁠—hee, hee!⁠—she said it was blue.”

“Blue? What’s blue?” snapped Miss Snodgrass.

“That word. She said it was so beautiful⁠ ⁠… and that it was blue.”

“I didn’t. Grey-blue, I said,” murmured Laura her cheeks aflame.

The class rocked; even Miss Snodgrass herself had to join in the laugh while she hushed and reproved. And sometimes after this, when a particularly long or odd word occurred in the lesson, she would turn to Laura and say jocosely: “Now, Laura, come on, tell us what colour that is. Red and yellow, don’t you think?”

But these were “Tom Fool’s colours”; and Laura kept a wise silence.

One day at geography, the pupils were required to copy the outline of the map of England. Laura, about to begin, found to her dismay that she had lost her pencil. To confess the loss meant one of the hard, public rebukes from which she shrank. And so, while the others drew, heads and backs bent low over their desks, she fidgeted and sought⁠—on her lap, the bench, the floor.

“What on earth’s the matter?” asked her neighbour crossly; it was the black-haired boarder who had winked at Laura the first evening at tea; her name was Bertha Ramsey. “I can’t draw a stroke if you shake like that.”

“I’ve lost my pencil.”

The girl considered Laura for a moment, then pushed the lid from a box of long, beautifully sharpened drawing-pencils. “Here, you can have one of these.”

Laura eyed the well-filled box admiringly, and modestly selected the shortest pencil. Bertha Ramsay, having finished her map, leaned back in her seat.

“And next time you feel inclined to boo-hoo at the tea-table, hold on to your eyebrows and sing Rule Britannia.⁠—Did it want its mummy, poor ickle sing?”

Here Bertha’s chum, a girl called Inez, chimed in from the other side.

“It’s all very well for you,” she said to Bertha, in a deep, slow voice. “You’re a weekly boarder.”

Laura had the wish to be very pleasant, in return for the pencil. So she drew a sigh, and said, with overemphasis: “How nice for your mother to have you home every week!”

Bertha only laughed at this, in a teasing way: “Yes, isn’t it?” But Inez leaned across behind her and gave Laura a poke.

“Shut up!” she telegraphed.

“Who’s talking down there?” came the governess’s cry. “Here you, the new girl, Laura what’s-your-name, come up to the map.”

A huge map of England had been slung over an easel; Laura was required to take the pointer and show where Stafford lay. With the long stick in her hand, she stood stupid and confused. In this exigency, it did not help her that she knew, from hearsay, just how