When a child tells on his classmates, he is usually either
over-conscientious or out of sympathy with them. Miss Field might
quietly have accepted the paper, and thus have avoided increasing the
estrangement between Sigrid and her classmates. She should then have set
about finding the cause of Sigrid’s isolation, and devised ways of
making her one of the group. She should have known that Sigrid’s pitiful
paper was a bid for the approbation and love which her isolation denied
her; it was the blind feeling for common ground with another human
being, which Sigrid missed because her relations with the other children
were not healthful.