"I thought so," said Dally with a broad grin on his good-humoured face. "Do you know what a fuzzy-wuzz is, Wellander?"
Keith shook his head, his face crimson with chagrin and humiliation as the whole class burst into anticipatory laughter.
"That's a chap who wants to do all of it all the time," explained Dally.
Keith did not quite see the point, but he kept his right arm a little more in check for a while after that, until one day the lesson was forgotten and history repeated itself.
"Now Keith is fuzzy-wuzzying again," said Dally, and Keith thought he would sink through the floor. His mind was quite made up never to ask permission to answer another question again, but that same afternoon, during the lesson in Swedish history, Dally dropped all questioning and asked Keith to explain to the class the main factors leading up to the Wars of Reformation--which Keith spent twenty minutes in doing while all the rest of the class had to sit still listening to him.
IV
Keith could not remain isolated to the same extent as in the earlier schools. Inevitable community sprang from similarity of sex and age alone. In the same direction worked the system of teaching which called for the united attention of the entire class during every moment of the lesson. It was impossible to form a part of the class without being in contact with all its other members. The boy who read aloud or answered a question became subjected to the criticism or admiration of all the rest. Rivalry in any field of study was just as likely to arise between two boys at different ends of the room as between those sitting side by side. The spirit of Dally tended to assist this fusion of personalities in every way, and the boy who kept apart was sure sooner or later to run foul of his good-humoured but well-aimed sallies. His attitude implied no tyranny, and he strove for no deadening conformity. On the contrary, he always spoke of a strongly marked individuality as the object of all education, but he tried to develop it by fearless contact with others rather than by jealous withdrawal.
Keith for the first time found himself part of a society, and he liked it because the teacher's insistence on scholarly achievement as the only standard of comparison gave him a chance to hold his own among a group of boys, most of whom counted themselves his superiors in every other respect. He was small and poor, of humble origin, without influential connections, without worldly advantages of any kind, but when mind was pitched against mind, he felt second to none--except in mathematics, where he could compete neither with Davidson, the Jewish banker's son who was primus, or with that gawky, cumbersome Anderson whose dullness in every other respect always kept him near the bottom of the class. For this reason Keith differed from most of the others by liking school better during the lessons than at any other time.
There were games in the schoolyard during the pauses, and some of these were played in large groups or by teams. This occurred particularly when echoes from some war abroad caused the whole school to divide into rival armies for the staging of regular battles, as during his second year, when all had to be Turks or Russians. But Keith didn't like battles except in books, and mostly the pauses broke up the class communities into small coteries or pairs. And the moment this happened, Keith found himself outside. He belonged to no special group. His appearance in the yard raised no delighted hails. He had no chum of his very own with whom to exchange secrets or lay plans for common adventures. And but for Dally, he would probably have spent most of his free time in the classroom.