Miss Gibbs, acting on the advice of a book entitled Education out of School Hours, was determined that every moment of the day should be filled with some occupation that led to culture. She carefully explained that the word “recreation” meant “re-creation”—a creating again, not a mere period of frivolity or lotus-eating, and advocated that all intervals of leisure should be devoted to intellectual interests. She frowned on girls who sauntered arm-in-arm round the garden, or sat giggling in the summer-house, and suggested suitable employments for their idle hands and brains. “Never waste a precious minute” was her motto, and the girls groaned under it. Healthy hobbies were all very well, but to be urged to ride them in season 61 and out of season was distinctly trying. One well-meant effort on Miss Gibbs’s part met with particular disapproval. She had decided to take the girls on Saturday afternoons to visit various old castles, Roman camps, and other objects of historical and archæological interest in the neighbourhood. On former similar occasions she had been in the habit of delivering a short lecture when on the spot; but, noticing that many of the girls were so distracted with gazing at the surroundings that they were not really listening, she determined that they should absorb the knowledge before visiting the place. She wrote careful notes, therefore, upon the subject of their next ramble, and giving them out in class, ordered each girl to copy them and to commit them to memory.
The result of her injunction was an outburst of almost mutinous indignation in Form V.
“When does she expect us to do it, I should like to know?” raged Morvyth. “There’s not a moment to spare in prep., so I suppose it will have to come out of our so-called recreation! Look here, I call this the very limit!”
“Saturday afternoon’s no holiday when we’ve got to go prowling round a wretched Roman camp!” mourned Valentine. “What do I care about ancient earthworks? If they were modern trenches, now, with soldiers in them, it would be something like! There’ll be nothing to see except some mounds. I suppose we shall have to stand round and listen while she holds forth, and look ‘intelligent’ and ‘interested’.”
“I don’t know whether she’s going to hold forth herself,” said Aveline. “I hear she’s invited several 62 people from an archæological society to meet us there, and probably one of them will do the spouting—some wheezy old gentleman with a bald head, or an elderly lady in a waterproof and spectacles. One knows the sort!”
“Oh, good biz!” exclaimed Raymonde. “If visitors are coming, Gibbie’ll have to talk to them, and she won’t have so much time to look after us. She’s welcome to the bald old boys! Let her have half a dozen if she wants!”
“You forget you’ve got to listen to them.”
“Oh, I’ll listen! At least I’ll look serious and politely absorbed. That’s all that’s expected.”
“In the meantime we’ve these wretched notes to copy,” groused Katherine.
“Have we? I don’t think so! I’ve got an idea. Maudie Heywood’s sure to make a most beautiful copperplate copy; we’ll borrow hers, and just skim them over to get a kind of general acquaintance with the subject, sufficient to show ‘intelligent interest’. Gibbie won’t be able to question us with those other people there.”