“It’s easy to see you’ve never been one of a large family, Lydia. You don’t seem to understand what rotting means.”
“I wonder you haven’t got used to being chaffed at your school. It must be a sloppy sort of place.”
“I daresay you’d think so,” said Lydia calmly. “But then, you see, the girls there go in for work, not play.”
“Oh, they go in for work, not play, do they?” mimicked Olive, but without much spirit, and as though conscious of her extreme poverty of repartee.
Lydia noticed, however, that both the Senthoven girls asked her frequent questions about her school, questions which she answered with all the assurance that she could muster.
That was something else to be remembered: it was better to assume that if your standards differ from those of your surroundings, it is by reason of their superiority.
Lydia lived up to her self-evolved philosophy gallantly, but she was in a minority, against a large majority that had, moreover, the advantage, incalculable in the period of adolescence, of a year or two’s seniority.
She did not like the feeling of inferiority, painfully new to her.
At Regency Terrace she was the subject of ill-concealed pride. Even Grandpapa, although he never praised, found no fault with her manners and bearing, and had lately admitted—no small compliment—that “Lyddie could manage Shamrock.”
Uncle George discussed chemistry and botany with her seriously, and even allowed her opinion to carry weight in certain small questions of science, and Mr. Monteagle Almond always treated her like a grown person, and alluded respectfully to the rarity of finding a mathematical mind in a woman.