“I don’t put much reliance on short cuts myself in maths or anything else,” replied Margaret. “When a thing has to be done, it is the quickest process in the end to do it thoroughly, because the next time you have to travel that way you know the road. By the way—I hate to speak of it, but you are a new girl, and you are not so well up in school traditions as some of the rest of us—did you use a help this morning?”
“A help?” queried Dorothy with a blank face. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes when a new girl comes she thinks to catch up in classwork by using cribs—helps they call them here, because it sounds rather better. Did you use anything of the sort this morning?” Margaret looked a little doubtful and apologetic as she put her question, but she meant to get at the bottom of the matter if she could.
“Why, no, of course I did not.” Dorothy’s tone was more bewildered than indignant; she could not imagine what had made Margaret ask such a question. “Do you think if I had been using a help, as you call it, that I should have to work as I do? Besides, do you not remember how Miss Groome coached me, and the pains she took, because I was such a duffer?”
Margaret laughed. “You are anything but a duffer, and you are a perfect whale at work. Oh! I wish they would not say things about you. It is so unfair on a new girl. You have enough to work against in having been put straight into the Sixth.”
“Who have been talking about me, and what has been said?” asked Dorothy quietly, but she went rather white. It was horrid to feel that her good name was being taken away behind her back.
“I do not know who started the talk,” said Margaret with a troubled air. “Kathleen Goatby was sitting here before you came. She said you had been dancing a lot with Bobby Felmore, but she expected he would have danced by himself rather than have been seen going round with you if he had known what was being said.”
“I shall know better whether to be angry or merely amused if you tell me what it is that is being said.” Dorothy’s voice was low, and her manner was outwardly calm, but there was a fire in her eyes which let Margaret know that she was very angry indeed.
“Kathleen said she heard Rhoda Fleming telling Joan Fletcher that you always used cribs, that you owed your position in your old school to this, and that you said it was the only way in which you could possibly get your work done. I told Kathleen she could contradict that as much as she liked, for I was quite positive it was not true. Cribs may help up to a certain point, but they are sure to fail one in the long run.”
“I have never used cribs,” said Dorothy with emphasis. “What I cannot understand is why Rhoda should try so hard to do me harm.”