"Indeed!" said Miss Evans, who did not like Jane's tone; "that doesn't make it right. Is there any one here who belonged to another class who can do this figure correctly?"
Alas, Miss Evans, your Irish impetuosity will cost you dear! Condemnation shone forth from thirty pairs of eyes, the hot, unreasoning condemnation of the young. Alas, Miss Evans, it will take you many a day to recapture what you have just lost! Alas, poor Judith, here was the opportunity to regain her lost self-complacency. It happened that she had been taught figure five in a different fashion, and, eager to show that she at least knew how, her hand went up.
"Ah, Judith knows how? Judith, stand out and do the figure."
The music began and Judith went through it accurately and perfectly, entirely to her own satisfaction and to that of Miss Evans.
"Good," said Miss Evans, "that's right. Now once more, Judith, so that the others may follow."
Judith's eyes flew to Nancy's. She loved to see the admiring affection which she had been finding there. But Nancy's eyes were cold and unseeing. Judith, like most clever little girls, was extremely sensitive to public opinion, and she almost dropped her dumb-bells in an agony of shame and humiliation as she saw the coldness of Nancy's eyes faithfully repeated in all the eyes about her. Alas, poor Judith! "Teacher's pet," terrible phrase, was whispered as the class filed out, and when Nancy and Josephine rushed down to the tuck shop for an ice-cream cone they affected not to see Judith, who at first followed disconsolately, and then fled to her room, where, with head buried under the pillows, she sobbed herself into a misery of self-pity and supposed homesickness.
Five o'clock bell rang. Horrors! She had forgotten that Aunt Nell was to be here at five o'clock to take her out for dinner. Aunt Nell would be cross at being kept waiting. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Would she never find her gloves? Where was her new scarf? She must have left them down in the cloakroom after morning walk. A hurried flight to the cloakroom, another search, and an entirely discomfited Judith presented herself in the drawing-room.
Aunt Nell would look displeased, she thought, as she entered. Judith really did not care that Aunt Nell had been inconvenienced, but merely that disapproval, instead of the approbation for which she thirsted, would be her portion. But Aunt Nell looked amused. Indeed, when they were once in the motor she laughed outright.
"I must say, Judy, considering that you have been in school only a week, you seem to have got rid of any superfluous neatness very quickly." And she pointed to a mirror at the side of the car.
Judith's eyes rounded with horror; she had washed her face, but a grimy streak still outlined one side of her chin, her hair was rough in spite of a hasty brushing, and her hat was comically askew.