"I—I have only been in the garden," said Helen, painfully conscious of tumbled hair, soiled hands, and torn frock.
"Only in the garden! What are those green marks on your dress?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Helen, beginning to brush herself vigorously and making bad worse.
"You don't know! It looks to me as if you had been climbing trees."
"Oh, no! indeed I haven't," said Helen, thankful to be able to deny so terrible an accusation.
"What have you been doing, then?"
"I—I only climbed a wall."
"Climbed a wall! What for?"
"To sit there."
"This is the child for whom no expense has been spared," observed Mrs. Desmond tragically to her sister. "Dancing lessons, drilling lessons, deportment, this last especially, have been dinned into her from morning till night. And yet your Agatha knows how to behave herself better than she does."