Poor Bridget! Her usual manner of entering a room was with her head eagerly thrust forward, and her long arms swinging; that was when she was quite comfortable and unselfconscious, but all this must be changed now, and to achieve this Miss Tasker devised an ingenious method of torture, which was practised every morning. It was this. Lessons began at ten o’clock, at which time the children were expected to assemble in the school-room, but now, instead of running in any how, they had to go through the following scene.
Miss Tasker sat at her desk ready to receive each pupil with a gracious smile and bow; then one by one they entered with a solemn bow or curtsy and said, “Good morning, Miss Tasker.”
“I call it humbug,” remarked the outspoken Bobbie, “as if we hadn’t seen her once already at breakfast-time.”
How Bridget hated this ordeal!
To know that Miss Tasker was waiting there ready to fix a keen grey eye on her deficiencies, and that she would probably say when the curtsy was done:
“Once again, Bridget, and remember to round the elbows.”
How to round your elbows when they naturally stuck out like knitting-pins, Bridget could not conceive, and I am afraid that, pushed to desperation, she soon left off even trying, and so became more awkward than ever.
But the ceremony once over, and lessons begun, Miss Tasker had no cause for complaint, for Bridget was a ready and ambitious pupil. She had a good memory, and being an imaginative child, it was a special pleasure to her to learn poetry, in repeating which she would quite forget herself and her awkwardness and pour forth page after page without a single mistake.
At such times, Miss Tasker’s chill remarks of “Your shoulders, Bridget”—“Don’t poke, Bridget,” generally fell on unheeding ears, but there was one occasion on which Bridget did feel them to be especially trying and out of place.
She had been learning one of the “Lays of Ancient Rome,” and was now repeating it all through. In proud consciousness of not having missed one word, and in full enjoyment of the swing of the poetry, she stood with her head thrust forward and her chin in the air: