"We're going to walk, Jocelyn; of course you can come with us if you like, but considering all the extra things a scholarship kid has to start with, p'r'aps you'd better cab it."
Joey was proud, and the inference was rather plain. They didn't want her company.
"I should have cabbed it anyhow. I'd rather," she told Syb, with decision, and walked off in the direction of the cabs, her head held very high.
She got into the first, and sat on the edge of the rather mildewy cushions, trying to face things out. It was all rather different from what she had pictured; but Mums needn't know that. And she wouldn't have to worry about the girls and their unfriendly ways at present anyhow, for she had the Lab to put tidy, and afterwards that other unknown terror, the lacing up of the Head Girl's boots.
If only she could have travelled with Miss Craigie or someone friendly, she could have asked how and when all these things were done; but Father had always said, "Don't grouse over what might have been; get on to what is." What is, appeared to be tidying the Lab for the ill-tempered French Professor; Joey settled to get on to that at once.
The cab was jolting along a flat marsh road that lay between a rolling sea of green. The real sea was not visible, for a white mist lay on the horizon, but the taste and the tang on her lips was salt, and there was a wonderful sense of space and freshness around her. Nothing broke the flatness of the landscape but here and there a squat church tower in the midst of a cluster of cottages.
Presently another tower drew her attention, a tall, gaunt tower, seeming like a warning, uplifted finger raising itself in the peaceful sea of green as if to say, "Watch!" Joey wondered what its story might be. She craned her head out of the cab window to look back at it, long after it was receding into distance, and was so absorbed in it that she was taken by surprise when the cab stopped before high ornamented iron gates, and the cabman shouted something indistinguishable. A pleasant-looking woman ran out, and swung the great gates back. This was Redlands. Joey began to feel a little quaky, though she tried to pretend it was all rather fun. The pretence wasn't very successful at that moment; but at least she knew what was expected of her on arrival. That was a decided comfort.
She looked before her with quite as much interest as she looked behind, while the cab crawled down the long, straight drive towards the irregular mass of dim red brick veiled in ivy. Architecturally, Redlands College left something to be desired, as it had been altered and added to at different times by people of widely differing views; but the whole had been mellowed together in a district where even new red brick hardly stares above a month; and presented to its world a silent, solid dignity.
Joe looked from the original Redlands, an early seventeenth century Manor House, to the wing built on by Madame Hèrbert, who kept a flourishing school for young ladies of quality in the stormy days of the Second James, and on to the additions of two centuries later, and the Swimming Bath, Gymnasium, and Laboratories marking the further requirements of the twentieth century and the march of education.