A Good-For-Nothing | Page 2

was the boy's answer.
"Give me your books," said the teacher.
Ralph reluctantly obeyed. That day the Colonel was not a little
surprised to see his son marching up the street, and every now and then

glancing behind him with a look of discomfort at the principal, who
was following quietly in his train, carrying a parcel of school-books.
Colonel Grim and his wife, divining the teacher's intention, agreed that
it was a great outrage, but they did not mention the matter to Ralph.
Henceforth, however, the boy refused to be accompanied by his servant.
A week later he was impudent to the teacher of gymnastics, who
whipped him in return. The Colonel's rage knew no bounds; he rode in
great haste to the gymnasium, reviled the teacher for presuming to
chastise his son, and committed the boy to the care of a private tutor.
At the age of sixteen, Ralph went to the capital with the intention of
entering the Military Academy. He was a tall, handsome youth, slender
of stature, and carried himself as erect as a candle. He had a light, clear
complexion of almost feminine delicacy; blond, curly hair, which he
always kept carefully brushed; a low forehead, and a straight, finely
modeled nose. There was an expression of extreme sensitiveness about
the nostrils, and a look of indolence in the dark-blue eyes. But the
ensemble of his features was pleasing, his dress irreproachable, and his
manners bore no trace of the awkward self-consciousness peculiar to
his age. Immediately on his arrival in the capital he hired a suite of
rooms in the aristocratic part of the city, and furnished them rather
expensively, but in excellent taste. From a bosom friend, whom he met
by accident in the restaurant's pavilion in the park, he learned that a pair
of antlers, a stuffed eagle, or falcon, and a couple of swords, were
indispensable to a well-appointed apartment. He accordingly bought
these articles at a curiosity shop. During the first weeks of his residence
in the city he made some feeble efforts to perfect himself in
mathematics, in which he suspected he was somewhat deficient. But
when the same officious friend laughed at him, and called him "green,"
he determined to trust to fortune, and henceforth devoted himself the
more assiduously to the French ballet, where he had already made some
interesting acquaintances.
The time for the examination came; the French ballet did not prove a
good preparation; Ralph failed. It quite shook him for the time, and he
felt humiliated. He had not the courage to tell his father; so he lingered
on from day to day, sat vacantly gazing out of his window, and tried

vainly to interest himself in the busy bustle down on the street. It
provoked him that everybody else should be so light-hearted, when he
was, or at least fancied himself, in trouble. The parlor grew intolerable;
he sought refuge in his bedroom. There he sat one evening (it was the
third day after the examination), and stared out upon the gray stone
walls which on all sides inclosed the narrow courtyard. The round
stupid face of the moon stood tranquilly dozing like a great Limburger
cheese suspended under the sky.
Ralph, at least, could think of a no more fitting simile. But the
bright-eyed young girl in the window hard by sent a longing look up to
the same moon, and thought of her distant home on the fjords, where
the glaciers stood like hoary giants, and caught the yellow moonbeams
on their glittering shields of snow. She had been reading "Ivanhoe" all
the afternoon, until the twilight had overtaken her quite unaware, and
now she suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to write her
German exercise. She lifted her face and saw a pair of sad, vacant eyes
gazing at her from the next window in the angle of the court She was a
little startled at first, but in the next moment she thought of her German
exercise and took heart.
"Do you know German?" she said; then immediately repented that she
had said it.
"I do," was the answer.
She took up her apron and began to twist it with an air of
embarrassment.
"I didn't mean anything," she whispered, at last. "I only wanted to
know."
"You are very kind."
That answer roused her; he was evidently making sport of her.
"Well, then, if you do, you may write my exercise for me. I have
marked the place in the book."

And she flung her book over to the window, and he caught it on the
edge of the sill, just as it was falling.
"You are a very strange girl," he remarked, turning over the leaves of
the book, although it was too dark to read. "How old are