"Since you are a freak, you must be clever, or else everybody will be ashamed of you, father, mother, and everybody! Even other people will be ashamed that in such a rich house there should be a freak. In a rich house everything must be beautiful and clever. Do you understand that?"
"Yes," said he, in his serious way, inclining his large head towards one side and looking into her face with his dark, lifeless eyes.
His father and mother were pleased with this attitude of their daughter towards her brother. They praised her good heart in his presence and by degrees she became the acknowledged guardian of the hunchback. She taught him to play with toys, helped him to prepare his lessons, read him stories about princes and fairies.
But, as formerly, he piled his toys in tall heaps, as if trying to reach something. He did his lessons carelessly and badly; but at the marvellous in tales he smiled in a curious, indecisive way, and once he asked his sister:
"Are princes ever hunchbacks?"
"No."
"And knights?"
"Of course not."
The boy sighed, as though tired; but putting her hand on his bristly hair his sister said:
"But wise wizards are always hunchbacks."