“Yes, I’ve noticed.”
“But she’s very well off for fronts.”
“Is she?”
Bella nodded. “Got three.”
“You don’t mean to tell me, Bella Wayne, Miss MacIver’s got three false fronts!”
“Yes, she has. And the weeest little, teenty-weenty trunk, she’s got. But it’s quite big enough. I could see she hadn’t anything, hardly, to put in it. Only bottles and fronts. After I’d begged pardon, and was going out, I suddenly thought she must be pretty poor, even if she did have such a lot of—do you suppose it’s because she can’t afford hats? Well, I don’t know. Anyhow I asked her what school she was going to after this. She said she didn’t know. Then I looked at those nightmarey MacIvers and asked her if she was going home. She suddenly began to look awfuller than ever. I saw she was thinking about the MacIvers, too, and it was ’most more than she could bear. So I ran back and begged her not to go. I said I did so need her.”
“You needed her?”
“Yes, to—to teach me decimal fractions.” Bella brought out the words a little shamefaced. Then, hurriedly, as if to forestall misapprehension: “Oh, I said I knew it wasn’t much of an attraction for her—of course, it must be perfectly horrid to have a girl like me in the arithmetic class. But, after all”—Bella paused, and then, with the air of a discoverer of one of the deeper mysteries of nature—“after all, Miss MacIver likes hammering those disgusting rules into girls. What she hates is to think there’s a girl going round without those rules somewhere inside her. So I just told her that wherever she was going she wouldn’t find anybody who knew as little about fractions as I did. I was certain I told her, perfectly certain, that she could show me all about ’em if only she wasn’t going away. One thing was sure as a gun—I was never going to let anybody else teach me! She said something about that. It was the first time she spoke, and she stood like this, with her flannel petticoat in one hand, and a bottle in the other. But I just said: ‘Seven people have tried it already, and you know if they succeeded. There’s only one person in the world that can make me understand those disgusting rules.’ And I went quite close to her, and I said: ‘Miss MacIver, cross my heart and hope I may die, if ever I let anybody else speak to me about fractions!’ So we agreed it was her duty to stay. But now the awful thing is I’ve got to do these sickening sums! Isn’t it terrible what a lot of trouble you can make for yourself, just all in a minute?”
“Well, I hope you’ll stick to your part of the bargain, Bella,” said the big girl, smiling.
“Got to—got to!” said the luckless one, flourishing her pencil over the biggest of the dragons. “If I don’t she’ll go away and starve with the rest of the MacIvers; or drink up all those medicine bottles, and die in a wink—like that!”