Chapter II
Ramsey Milholland sat miserably in school, his conscious being
consisting principally of a dull hate. Torpor was a little dispersed
during a fifteen-minute interval of "Music," when he and all the other
pupils in the large room of the "Five B. Grade" sang repeated fractions
of what they enunciated as "The Star Span-guh-hulled Banner"; but
afterward he relapsed into the low spirits and animosity natural to
anybody during enforced confinement under instruction. No alleviation
was accomplished by an invader's temporary usurpation of the teacher's
platform, a brisk and unsympathetically cheerful young woman mounting
thereon to "teach German."
For a long time mathematics and German had been about equally repulsive
to Ramsey, who found himself daily in the compulsory presence of both;
but he was gradually coming to regard German with the greater horror,
because, after months of patient mental resistance, he at last began to
comprehend that the German language has sixteen special and particular
ways of using the German article corresponding to that flexible bit of a
word so easily managed English--_the_.
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