It was a bare, ugly country schoolroom, anyway, with the stained floor, the windows with two broken panes, and the unpainted desks with innumerable scars made by the boys’ jack-knives, and Mr. Holmes was unreasonable, anyway, to give her such a hard punishment, and she didn’t care if she had been kept in, anyway!

In that “anyway” she found vent for all her crossness.  Sometimes she said, “I don’t care,” but when she said, “I don’t care, anyway!” then everybody knew that Marjorie West was dreadful.

“I’m through,” she thought triumphantly, “and I didn’t cheat, and I wasn’t mean, and nobody has helped me.”

Yes, somebody had helped her.  She was sorry that she forgot to think that God had helped her.  Perhaps people always did get through!  If they didn’t help themselves along by doing wrong and—­God helped them.  The sunshine rippled over her face again and she counted the words on her slate for the second time to assure herself that there could be no possible mistake.  Slowly she counted seven hundred, then with a sudden impulse seized her pencil and wrote each of the seven words five times more to be “sure they were all right.”

Josie Grey called her “horridly conscientious,” and even Rie Blauvelt wished that she would not think it wicked to “tell” in the class, and to whisper about something else when they had permission to whisper about the lessons.

By this time you have learned that my little Marjorie was strong and sweet.  I wish you might have seen her that afternoon as she crouched over the wooden desk, snuggled down in the coarse, plaid shawl, her elbows resting on the hard desk, her chin dropped in her two plump hands, with her eyes fixed on the long, closely written columns of her large slate.  She was not sitting in her own seat, her seat was the back seat on the girls’ side, of course, but she was sitting midway on the boys’ side, and her slate was placed on the side of the double desk wherein H.R. was cut in deep, ugly letters.  She had fled to this seat as to a refuge, when she found herself alone, with something of the same feeling, that once two or three years ago when she was away from home and homesick she used to kneel to say her prayers in the corner of the chamber where her valise was; there was home about the valise and there was protection and safety and a sort of helpfulness about this desk where her friend Hollis Rheid had sat ever since she had come to school.  This was her first winter at school, her mother had taught her at home, but in family council this winter it had been decided that Marjorie was “big” enough to go to school.