In a few months, I became a different being. The bitterness that had been growing up within me gradually disappeared, and I began to have confidence in myself and to try to win the companionship of the other children.
But a sudden change took place in my schoolmates, who grew envious of the preference shown me by the teachers. Since they could no longer ridicule me for the carelessness of my dress, they now began to reproach me for my vanity and to call me a coquette who only thought of pleasing through appearances.
This blow was altogether too hard for me to bear. I knew that they were wrong, for with all the care I bestowed on my dress, it was not half so fine as theirs, as I had but two calico dresses which I wore alternately, a week at a time, through the summer. I was again repelled from them; and at noon, when the rest of the scholars went home, I remained with my teacher-friend in the schoolroom, assisting him in correcting the exercises of the pupils.
I took the opportunity to tell him of the curious envy that had taken possession of the girls, upon which he began to explain to me human nature and its fallacies, drawing inferences therefrom for personal application. He found a ready listener in me. My inclination to abstract thought, combined with the unpleasant experience I had had in life, made me an attentive pupil and fitted me to comprehend his reasoning in the broadest sense.
For fifteen months, I thus spent the noon hour with him in the schoolroom, receiving lessons in logic and reasoning upon concrete and abstract matters that have since proved of far more psychologic value to me than ten years of reading on the same subjects.
A strong attachment grew up between us: he became a necessity to me, and I revered him like an oracle. But his health failed, and he left the school at the end of these fifteen months in a consumption.
Shortly after, he sent to the school for me one morning to ask me to visit him on his deathbed. I was not permitted to leave the class until noon; when, just as I was preparing to go, a messenger came to inform the principal that he had died at eleven.
This blow fell so heavily upon me that I wished to leave the school at once. I was forced to stay three weeks longer, until the end of the quarter, when I left the schoolroom on the first of April, 1843, at the age of thirteen years and seven months, and never entered it again.
CHAPTER V
Training in all details of housework—After mastering them, spends most of time reading in father’s library—Gradually begins assisting mother in care of patients—Contact with the heights and depths of human nature, from dens to palaces—Nurses two aunts and keeps house for their family—Dr. Arthur Lutze guides her reading in homeopathy and mesmerism—Attack of “brain fever”—Father burns books from Dr. Lutze—Marie learns French, plain sewing, dressmaking and the management of the household, while continuing to assist in mother’s practice. (Fourteen to eighteen years of age: 1843-1847.)