"This is the speed test," Miss Marchrose announced clearly. "Are you ready?"
Nobody answered, but the tension in the room was obvious, and the little boy in front squared his shoulders, bending his head forward until it almost touched his note-book, and grasping a short pencil in a stubby hand of which each fingernail was quite neatly and symmetrically outlined in black.
"In the United Kingdom there are over 500 railway companies, the lines of which ... are worked or leased by about forty of the principal companies.... It was in the first half of the nineteenth century that the majority of the great undertakings received parliamentary sanction...."
Miss Marchrose's voice was quite level and her enunciation distinct. She varied neither her intonation nor the rate at which she read from the printed page before her, already carefully subdivided into phrases.
Most of the shorthand-writers seemed able to take down the test—a shade behind the reader, however, so that their pencils were never altogether off the paper. The youths in the back of the room displayed greater facility, sometimes able to pause with the end of a sentence and relax an aching right hand. Only the little boy dashed down his dots and outlines as the words left Miss Marchrose's lips, and sat with pencil impudently poised in the air during the regulated pause separating each phrase. Both the elder women in the class, who might have been of the less superior type of hotel-clerk or assistant manageress, came to early grief.
One of them laid her pencil down outright after the first five-and-twenty words, shaking her head, and looking resentfully at the aggressively proficient child in front of her; and the other one, though scribbling frantically, her pencil almost piercing the paper, with a painfully flushed face and a hand that shook from strain, was quite evidently unable to keep up with the dictation, and was, moreover, scribbling down a large proportion of the words in almost illegible longhand.
Iris Easter watched the class with very evident interest and amusement, and smiled at the precocious little boy until she had extorted from him in return a significantly triumphant grin.
Lady Rossiter also looked at the class with that gravely observant gaze that, more often than not, denotes complete absorption in something quite else, and thought about Miss Marchrose.
She also glanced at her once or twice, as she stood facing the room, very erect, with her eyes on the book, and with no trace of shyness or nervousness in her bearing.
Edna, whose very decided beauty was of the type that seldom or never varies, could on this occasion look at Miss Marchrose with complete satisfaction, and even ask herself whether that woman could possibly be a day under thirty-five. Neither the strong sunlight of a frosty January morning nor the contrast with Iris Easter showed her to advantage.