What makes it horrid is that one has to go to school in all kinds of weather. When there is sunshine and such fresh, crisp, clear air that it tingles through your whole body even to your finger-tips, and you have to go to school and sit there three, four, five hours, then I really think it is disgusting. Yes, I allow myself to say that then it truly is disgusting.
But when there is a drizzling rain and I know my lessons, it is not so bad to go to school, after all. I almost always know my lessons, for that matter. When I study them twice over and then shut my eyes and hear myself, I know them. When there is something very difficult in our “History of the World,” such as the French Revolution, the Legislative Assembly, the Representative Assembly, and all that, why, then I have to study the lesson over three times.
I am at the head of the class, and always have been, as far back as I can remember. So the other girls plague me to translate for them till I am often bored. I scarcely get inside the class-room door in the mornings before they rush at me, each with her book in her hand, and draw me to a window or a corner to translate the German lesson or the English lesson for them.
There is only one girl that I am afraid might get above me in the class and take my place away from me. That is Anna Brynildsen. From the moment she came into the school, and being a new pupil was put at the foot of the class, I have been afraid of her, because people said she was frightfully clever. She has already crept up so that her seat is the second from the head.
There is something awfully exasperating to me about Anna Brynildsen. I don’t like her looks, I don’t like her clothes or anything. Antoinette Wium says I’d like her better if she weren’t so clever. Well, I don’t like the glib way she recites, as if everything were as easy as A B C; and that self-satisfied look she wears is enough to exasperate any one, I think. She almost never talks but when she does say anything, every word is so sensible that she might as well be eighty years old.
Ugh! that Anna Brynildsen!
Now I will tell you how a day at school goes with us. One only time in all my life have I cheated at school, and it is that particular day I am going to tell about.
I must begin at the beginning, and that is old Ingeborg who cleans the schoolroom, wipes up the dust, puts wood in the stove, and so on. But old Ingeborg is so old that she can’t see the dust, and when we come to school it is lying thick everywhere. That is why I began to do the dusting.
In the first hour, we always have a student from a Normal School, Mr. Bu, as teacher. Did you ever hear such a name? But he is not half bad, Mr. Bu; he is exceedingly kind. You see, very often I don’t get the dusting and arranging done in time, but he doesn’t say anything if I, once in a while, keep on dusting after the lesson begins.
“It is absolutely necessary, Mr. Bu,” I say.