But Schwilk, being Schwilk, would not let the matter rest. Perhaps because only five minutes remained in the class period and he couldn’t dismiss them before the bell rang, or very reasonably introduce a fresh topic, he stood with his hands on his hips, cocky, censorious, scornful. “Well! There are no questions? You really presume to think you’ve understood it all? The subject of your next composition is the will to believe—the faith that creates faith—”

Marya suddenly raised her hand and asked, “How many mountain climbers made the jump? How many made it, and how many fell?”

Schwilk blinked at her as if he’d never heard anything so idiotic.

“I just wondered—is it in a book or something—is any of this real,” Marya said, “or just made up to talk about?”

No one, including Marya, could have said why her remarks—childish, defiant, obstreperous—should have struck the class as irresistibly funny: but everyone began to laugh: and as the exchange continued the laughter mounted. Shorn of its overwrought and claustrophobic setting, it was a puzzling or mildly amusing incident at best, but in room 110 of the Innisfail Consolidated School, that rain-locked March afternoon, it provoked such peals of adolescent laughter that Marya was to remember her triumph—for surely it was a triumph, in all its silliness—all her life.

Schwilk stammered a reply. Of course the mountain climber wasn’t “real,” the proposition was a philosophical proposition, and Marya asked, “What happens to the brave mountain climber who has faith, and jumps, and falls just the same—didn’t that happen all the time?” Schwilk, hurt, rattled, told her she misunderstood, she willfully misunderstood, the distance wasn’t supposed to be beyond the mountain climber’s powers—“for of course that would make the situation tragic—hopeless—meaningless”—the proposition had only to do with spiritual faith. Marya, pretending to be unaware of her classmates’ laughter, asked how the mountain climber could know that the distance was, or wasn’t, beyond his powers: “Wouldn’t he need a long yardstick or something to measure it with?” Schwilk said angrily that an expert mountain climber could gauge distances with the eye, very likely: and Marya shot back, with a glance over her shoulder at her grinning companions, “Some expert! Stuck up in the mountains! Anybody that stupid, he deserves to die!”

Schwilk tried without success to quiet the class. He told Marya that she was being ridiculous, she must know she was being ridiculous; and Marya said, drawling, that the mountain climber was the ridiculous one: she’d never gotten stuck up in the mountains, and never would.

Schwilk told her to shut her mouth and keep it shut.

Marya said, “You asked if we had questions and I asked a question and I still want to know—how many mountain climbers made the jump?—how many made it, and how many fell?—seeing as how they had faith—”