II
The school, as always, seemed such a strange place. It was both gay and depressing, and hummed with a kind of unnatural industry. It was gay in the intervals between the lessons, and extremely tedious during the lessons.
The subjects of study were most singular and useless. They concerned: folk, who had died long ago and did no good while they lived, and whom, for some unknown reason, it was necessary to recall after all these centuries, although some of the personages had never even existed; verbs, which were conjugated with something; nouns, which were declined for some purpose or other, though no use could be found for them in living speech; figures, which call for proofs of something which need not be proven at all; and much else, equally inconsequential and absurd. And there was nothing in all this that one could not do without; there was no correlation of facts, there was no straightforward answer to the eternal question: Why and Wherefore?