“Oh, I dare say, and a nasty conceited thing. Everybody’ll hate you.”
“But you oughtn’t to hate me, Tom; it’ll be very wicked of you, for I shall be your sister.”
“Yes, but if you’re a nasty disagreeable thing I shall hate you.”
“Oh, but, Tom, you won’t! I sha’n’t be disagreeable. I shall be very good to you, and I shall be good to everybody. You won’t hate me really, will you, Tom?”
“Oh, bother! never mind! Come, it’s time for me to learn my lessons. See here! what I’ve got to do,” said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him and showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her ears, and prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in Euclid. She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but presently, becoming quite bewildered, her face flushed with irritation. It was unavoidable; she must confess her incompetency, and she was not fond of humiliation.
“It’s nonsense!” she said, “and very ugly stuff; nobody need want to make it out.”
“Ah, there, now, Miss Maggie!” said Tom, drawing the book away, and wagging his head at her, “You see you’re not so clever as you thought you were.”
“Oh,” said Maggie, pouting, “I dare say I could make it out, if I’d learned what goes before, as you have.”
“But that’s what you just couldn’t, Miss Wisdom,” said Tom. “For it’s all the harder when you know what goes before; for then you’ve got to say what definition 3 is, and what axiom V. is. But get along with you now; I must go on with this. Here’s the Latin Grammar. See what you can make of that.”
Maggie found the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,—like strange horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some far-off region,—gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really very interesting, the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn; and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most fragmentary examples were her favourites. Mors omnibus est communis would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a son “endowed with such a disposition” afforded her a great deal of pleasant conjecture, and she was quite lost in the “thick grove penetrable by no star,” when Tom called out,—