The Getting of Wisdom quotes

“It is, it’s much too short.”

Mother gave her a slight shake. “Don’t you contradict me! Do you want to tell me I don’t know what length you’re to wear your dresses?”

“I won’t wear it at all if you don’t make it longer,” said Laura defiantly.

But instead of picking them up, she threw herself on her bed and buried her face in the pillow. She did not dare to cry, for fear of making her eyes red, but she hugged the cool linen to her cheeks.

“I hate them all,” she said passionately, speaking aloud to herself. “Oh, how I hate them!”

—and wild schemes of vengeance flashed through her young mind. She did not even halt at poison or the knife:

for, unless one was very firm indeed in the conviction of one’s own innocence, to be beneath this eye was apt to induce a disagreeable sense of guilt. In the case of Mrs. Gurley, familiarity had never been known to breed contempt.

She was possessed of what was little short of genius, for ruling through fear;

and no more fitting overseer could have been set at the head of these half-hundred girls, of all ages and degrees: gentle and common;

In a very short time, there was no more persistent shrinker from the ice of this gaze than little Laura.

In the presence of Mrs. Gurley the child had a difficulty in getting her breath.

Her first week of school life had been one unbroken succession of snubs and reprimands. For this, the undue familiarity of her manner was to blame:

Laura saw nothing wrong. “Oh, no, at home,” she answered.

“I wouldn’t care to play the things I learn here, to people. They’re so dull.”

A girl emitted a faint squeak. But a half turn of Mrs. Strachey’s head subdued her. “Oh, I hope you will soon get to like classical music also,” said the lady gravely, and in all good faith. “We prefer it, you know, to any other.”

“Do you mean things like the Air in G with Variations? I’m afraid I never shall. There’s no tune in them.”

Music was as fatal to Laura’s equilibrium as wine would have been.

Finding herself next Mr. Strachey, she now turned to him and said, with what she believed to be ease of manner: “Mr. Strachey, will you please tell me what that picture is hanging over the mantelpiece?

“That,” said Mr. Strachey, with extreme deliberation: “that is the portrait, by a great painter, of a great poet—Dante Alighieri.”

“Oh, Dante, is it?” said Laura showily⁠—she had once heard the name. “Oh, yes, of course, I know now. He wrote a book, didn’t he, called Faust? I saw it over there by the door. What lovely books!”

But here Mr. Strachey abruptly changed his seat, and Laura’s thirst for information was left unquenched.

Maria Morell, cautiously tapped, threw back her head and roared with laughter.

“Bless its little heart! Does it want to know?⁠—say, Laura, who’s your mash?”

“No one,” answered Laura stoutly. “I only asked. For I guess you know, Maria.”

Even Mr. Strachey, the unapproachable, had been known, on running full tilt into a pretty girl’s arms in an unlit passage, to be laughingly confused.

Laura was not, of course, the sole outsider in these things;

sprinkled through the College were various others, older, too, than she, who by reason of demureness of temperament, or immersion in their work, stood aloof. But they were lost in the majority, and, as it chanced, none of them belonged to Laura’s circle.

And now, by her own experience, Laura was led to the following discovery: that, if you imagine a thing with sufficient force, you can induce your imagining to become reality.

By dint of pretending that it was so, she gradually worked herself up into an attack of love, which was genuine enough to make her redden when Mr. Shepherd was spoken of, and to enjoy being teased about him.

And since, at any rate when in church, she was a sincerely religious little girl, and one to whom—notwithstanding her protested indifference to forms of worship—such emotional accessories as flowers, and music, and highly coloured vestments made a strong appeal, her feelings for Mr.

Robby, she would think of him pinching and screwing, with a hawk-like eye on a shadowy bishopric. Of her warm feelings for him, genuine or imaginary, not a speck remained.

The first touch of reality had sunk them below her ken, just as a drop of cold water sinks the floating grounds in a coffeepot

… But did she confess this, confess also that, save for a handful of monosyllables, her only exchange of words with him had been a line of Virgil; and, still more humbling, that she had liked his wife and sister better than himself:

Indeed, the plunge once taken, it was astounding how easy it became to make up things about the Shepherds; the difficulty was, to know where to stop.

Fictitious details crowded thick and fast upon her⁠—a regular hotchpotch; she had only to stretch out her hand and seize what she needed.

It was simpler than the five-times multiplication-table, and did not need to be learnt. But all the same she was not idle:

Another and weightier reason was, their slower brains could not conceive the possibility of such extraordinarily detailed lying as that to which Laura now subjected them.

Its very elaboration stood for its truth.

And the days passed, and Laura had the happiest ideas. A strange thing about them was that they came to her quite unsought, dropping on her like Aladdin’s oranges on his turban.

Such initial scepticism as may have lurked in her hearers was soon got the better of.

For, crass realists though these young colonials were, and bluntly as they faced facts, they were none the less just as hungry for romance as the most insatiable novel-reader.

Romance in any guise was hailed by them, and swallowed uncritically, though it was no more permitted to interfere with the practical conduct of their lives than it is in the case of just that novel-reader, who puts untruth and unreality from him, when he …

Another and weightier reason was, their slower brains could not conceive the possibility of such extraordinarily detailed lying as that to which Laura now subjected them. Its very elaboration stood for its truth.

And the days passed, and Laura had the happiest ideas. A strange thing about them was that they came to her quite unsought, dropping on her like Aladdin’s oranges on his turban.

All she had to do was to fit them into their niche in her fabrication.

nothing more or less than a frustrated attempt on her virtue. It was almost ready to be submitted to them—for she had read Pamela with heartfelt interest during the holidays—and only a few connecting links were missing, with which to complete her own case.

Then, without the slightest warning, the blow fell.

It was a Sunday afternoon; the half-hour that preceded Sunday school. Laura, in company with several others, was in the garden, getting her Bible chapter by heart, when Maria called her.

There was no moon; but, overhead, the indigo-blue was a prodigal glitter of stars—myriads of silver eyes that perforated the sky. They sparkled with a cold disregard of the small girl standing under the mulberry tree; but Laura, too, was only half-alive to their magnificence.

Her thoughts ran on suicide, on making an end of her blighted career.

God was evidently not going to be generous or long-suffering enough to come to her aid; and in imagination she saw the fifty-five gaining on her like a pack of howling hyenas; saw Mrs. Gurley, Mr. Strachey—Mother.

And she was quick to discover that this was a shortcut towards regaining her lost place: to conceal what she truly felt—particularly if her feelings ran counter to those of the majority.

For, the longer she was at school, the more insistently the truth was driven home to her, that the majority is always in the right.

In the shifting of classes that took place at the year’s end, she left the three chief witnesses of her disgrace—Tilly, Maria, Kate—behind her. She was again among a new set of girls.

“Yes, of course I have. But I say”—Laura, who always slipped quickly out of her clothes, was sitting in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, hugging her knees.

“I say, M. P., if everybody told stories, and everybody knew everybody else was telling them, then truth wouldn’t be any good any more at all, would it? If nobody used it?”

“What rubbish you do talk!” said Mary serenely, as she shook her toothbrush on to a towel and rubbed it dry.

“What rubbish you do talk!” said Mary serenely, as she shook her toothbrush on to a towel and rubbed it dry.

“As if truth were a soap!” remarked Cupid who was already in bed, reading Nana, and trying to smoke a cigarette under the blankets.

“You can’t do away with truth, child.”

“My gracious!” ejaculated Cupid, and sat down and fanned herself with a hairbrush. “You don’t imagine you’re a Scott, do you? Here, hold me, M. P., I’m going to faint!”—and at Laura’s quick and scarlet denial, she added:

“Well, why the unmentionable not use the eyes the Lord has given you, and write about what’s before them every day of your life?”

“Do you think that would be better?”

and she had seen the caves and rocky holes where blackfellows were said to have hidden themselves in early times; but neither this particular excursion, nor the exciting incident which she described with all the aplomb of an eyewitness, had ever taken place.

That is to say: not a word of her narration was true, but every word of it might have been true.

And with this she had an unqualified success.

It was this. In your speech, your talk with others, you must be exact to the point of pedantry, and never romance or draw the longbow; or you would be branded as an abominable liar.

Whereas, as soon as you put pen to paper, provided you kept one foot planted on probability, you might lie as hard as you liked: indeed, the more vigorously you lied, the louder would be your hearers’ applause.

And Laura fell asleep over a chuckle.

“Say what you think they are,” persisted Laura and waggled the other’s arm, to make her speak.

“Mostly fools,” said Evelyn, and laughed again⁠—laughed in all the conscious power of lovely eighteen.

Overjoyed at this oneness of mind, Laura threw her arms round her friend’s neck and kissed her. “You dear!” she said.

“Of course I like you, you silly child! But that’s altogether different. And I don’t like you any less because I enjoy having some fun with them, too.”

“I don’t want your old leavings!” said Laura savagely.

It hurt, almost as much as having a tooth pulled out, did this knowledge that your friend’s affection was wholly yours only as long as no man was in question. And out of the sting, Laura added:

in taking long, solitary, evening walks, by choice on the heel of a thunderstorm, when the red earth was riddled by creeklets of running water; till Mother, haunted by a lively fear of encounters with “swags” or Chinamen, put her foot down and forbade them.

Sufferers are seldom sweet-tempered; and Laura formed no exception.

Pin, her most frequent companion, had to bear the brunt of her acrimony: hence the two were soon at war again. For Pin was tactless, and took small heed of her sister’s grumpy moods, save to cavil at them.

As for you, Laura, if this is your only return for all the money I’ve spent on you, then I wish from my heart you’d never seen the inside of that Melbourne school.”

“How pretty your eyes look, mother, when your eyelashes get floury!”

said Laura, struck by the vivid contrast of black and white. She merely stated the fact, without intent to flatter, her anger being given to puffing out as suddenly as it kindled.

Was it then impossible, they asked themselves, for Laura Rambotham to do anything in a decorous and ladylike way? Must she at every step put them out of countenance? It was not respectable to be so fervent.

Religion, felt they, should be practised with modesty; be worn like an indispensable but private garment.

Whereas she committed the gross error in taste of, as it were, parading it outside her other clothes.

The idea once lodged in her mind, she wrestled with Him night after night, filling His ears with her petitions, and remaining on her knees for such an immoderate length of time that her roommates, who were sleepy, openly expressed their impatience.

“Oh, draw it mild, Laura!” said the girl in the neighbouring bed, when it began to seem as if the supplicant would never rise to her feet again. “Leave something to ask Him tomorrow.”

But Laura, knowing very well that the Lord our God is a jealous God, was mindful not to scrimp in lip-service, or to shirk the minutest ceremony by means of which He might be propitiated and won over.

Reports ran of the exceptionally “catchy” nature of Dr. Pughson’s questions; and

Laura’s prayer, the night before, was more like a threat than a supplication.

The class had only just entered the Headmaster’s room on the eventful morning, and begun to choose desks, when there came a summons to Laura to take a music-lesson. This was outside consideration, and Dr.