about it? Who was he, to arrange one's life! Hadn't one agreed to come here simply to escape the Wilcoves and the wiseacres! "Report yourself to the physical instructor!" Let the physical instructor report himself and see how he liked it!
He had started to run up the long grassy slope towards the citadel.
The French class was droning out, in unison, the parts of the verb "to have." Paul sat sullen beside a young savage with whom he had been paired, presumably, in accordance with a theory that Paul's good manners would have a civilizing effect. The theory may have been excellent, but it scarcely compensated Paul for the pin-pricks and pinches, the surreptitious kicks and hair-pulling whereby the savage was working his way up in the scale of civilization.
A stormy scene in the head master's study, following Paul's failure to appear for music lessons, had been followed by a still stormier séance in which he had been held to account in the matter of absences from Gym. This morning there had been a humiliating exposition in the arithmetic class, all because Paul, standing at the blackboard, hadn't been able to see through a new system of "doing" decimals, and had, after a long, fatiguing, chalky evolution come to the conclusion that the farmer had paid $185,363 for a dozen sheep. His classmates had slapped their legs in ecstasy, and the teacher, with an air of relenting—which only made matters worse, for it was a new way of belittling him; as if the silly answer mattered one way or another!—had said, "Don't you think you could reduce that sum so that it would be more in keeping with a poor farmer's purse? Experiment with the decimal. See if you can't put it in a more reasonable place."
