"It's your duty to learn it whether you hate it or not. You will grow up an ignorant, good-for-nothing man unless you study your lessons. Everybody knows that. You ought to go straight home and tell your father you have been kept after school. Just tell him all about it. Will you?"
There was a puckering of the boy's mouth, but no answer.
"If you were stupid, and couldn't learn if you tried, it would be different, but you are just perverse and—and bad. If you don't do better I shall just go and tell your father myself."
"Oh, Ruthy! You wouldn't do that!" And he let go the button and took a backward step, as one who shrinks from a faithless friend.
"But it's for your own good, Drowsy. And, besides, teacher will tell him if I don't."
"I s'pose she would."
"You don't want to grow up and know less than anybody else—even less than school children?"
Cyrus smiled. "That would be funny!"
"No, it would not be funny. Do you think it would be funny to dig ditches all your life and drive oxen like old Sim Barker?"
"But what makes him so bad is because he's foolish and dirty and has tobacco juice in the corners of his mouth. Geography wouldn't help him—nor anybody else. Geography!" And Cyrus uttered the word with a fathomless contempt. "That geography just makes me sick—just sick, sick, sick—and mad! What stuff it tells you! Which is the largest African Lake? Where are the Barbary States? What about the surface of Abyssinia? What are the products of the Cape of Good Hope? Who in thunder cares for the climate of Uruguay or the exports of Ecuador? Who'd ever be such a fool as to want to remember the population of Thibet? And who cares anyway? Any jackass can know those things whenever he wants to by looking at a map or that fool geography."