THE TWENTY-FIRST OF
OCTOBER
In the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters stood
on pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that one of us
would be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and without regard to his
own preferences, to wrestle with the inflections of some idiotic language
long rightly dead; while another, from some fancied artistic tendency
which always failed to justify itself, might be told off without warning to
hammer out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys with
tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to either sex, and
held to be necessary even for him whose ambition soared no higher than to
crack a whip in a circus-ring-- in geography, for instance, arithmetic, or
the weary doings of kings and queens--each would have scorned to excel.
And, indeed, whatever our individual gifts, a general dogged
determination to shirk and to evade kept us all at much the same dead
level,--a level of ignorance tempered by insubordination.