“You might not be the better for it, Sissy.”
Sissy submitted, after a little hesitation, “I should not be the worse, Miss Louisa.” To which Miss Louisa answered, “I don’t know that.”
There had been so little communication between these two – both because life at Stone Lodge went monotonously round like a piece of machinery which discouraged human interference, and because of the prohibition relative to Sissy’s past career – that they were still almost strangers. Sissy, with her dark eyes wonderingly directed to Louisa’s face, was uncertain whether to say more or to remain silent.
“You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can ever be,” Louisa resumed. “You are pleasanter to yourself, than I am to my self.”
“But, if you please Miss Louisa,” Sissy pleaded, “I am – O so stupid!”
Louisa, with a brighter laugh than usual, told her she would be wiser by and by.
“You don’t know,” said Sissy, half crying, “what a stupid girl I am. All through school hours I make mistakes. Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild call me up, over and over again, regularly to make mistakes. I can’t help them. They seem to come natural to me.”
“Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I suppose, Sissy?”
“O no!” she eagerly returned. “They know everything.”
“Tell me some of your mistakes.”
“I am almost ashamed,” said Sissy, with reluctance. “But to-day, for instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.”
“National, I think it must have been,” observed Louisa.
“Yes, it was. – But isn’t it the same?” she timidly asked.
“You had better say, National, as he said so,” returned Louisa, with her dry reserve.
“National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?”
“What did you say?” asked Louisa.
“Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,” said Sissy, wiping her eyes.
“That was a great mistake of yours,” observed Louisa.
“Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me again. And he said, This school-room is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was – for I couldn’t think of a better one – that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong too.”
“Of course it was.”
“Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said, Here are the stutterings – ”
“Statistics,” said Louisa.
“Yes, Miss Louisa – they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s another of my mistakes – of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr. M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss;” here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error; “I said it was nothing.”
“Nothing, Sissy?”
“Nothing, Miss – to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn,” said Sissy. “And the worst of all is, that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like it.”
Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head, as it drooped abashed before her, until it was raised again to glance at her face. Then she asked: