“Jerry,” she repeated more than once, “if I don’t get the German prize I shall go out of my mind. Oh, I don’t know what I shall do! I just can’t bear to think of it. It does not seem fair, does it, that I, who have been working steadily all these years, doing my best, my very best, should suddenly be set aside by a stranger, to whom the work is far easier than to me?—a girl who is far cleverer than I, who, for all I know—she never tells us anything—may have learnt her German in Germany and her French in France. That isn’t fair competition. If it had been Gueda now, or one of the girls who have learnt as I have done, with no greater advantages, I might have felt it in a way, but I should have known it was fair. And now it just isn’t.”
“No,” Jerry agreed, “it isn’t. But oh, Charlotte, it does make me so unhappy when you speak like that.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Charlotte penitently. “I’ll try not; but you see I’ve no one else to speak to. I told you I had left off talking to mamma about it all—and—there is just no one but you I can speak to.”
“No, don’t leave off speaking to me,” said Jerry; “I should know you were thinking of it all the same. Charlotte,” he went on after a little pause, “do you think the girl herself thinks it fair? You have said sometimes that you thought she was really a nice girl.”
“I can’t make her out,” Charlotte replied. “She seems nice, only she is dreadfully reserved. As for whether she thinks it fair or not, I don’t fancy she thinks about it in that way at all. I’m not sure that she really knows how clever she is. She does not seem conceited. But I suppose she wants very much to get the prize. The truth is, she should not be in the class or in any class; she should be by herself.”
“I wonder the teachers don’t see it,” said Jerry.
“Oh, they don’t care like that. They can’t make such particular distinctions. It’s only me it really matters to,” said Charlotte hopelessly. “I suppose everything’s unfair in this world. I don’t see how one is to help getting to have horrid feelings. What can it matter to her, so spoilt and rich and beautiful—what can one little school prize matter to her as it does to me?” and she groaned despairingly.
Jerry was silent for a few minutes; then he spoke again.
“Charlotte,” he said, “are you sure you won’t get it? It would be all the more of a triumph if you did win it over her.”
“But I know I can’t,” she said. “Of course I shall do my best; I should need to do that any way. Some of the girls are really very good German scholars. But she is more than good; she really writes it almost perfectly. Oh, no, I have no chance—the notes for the composition were given out last week. I have begun it, but I almost think I shall spill a bottle of ink over it, or let it catch fire accidentally at the last minute.”