Betty found herself flushing, half with surprise and half with shame.
“Now this chest of drawers is your own, of course; but each girl keeps her linen in the top long drawer, and her blouses—” On wound the lesson while the new girl stood submissively by. “The right-hand small drawer you may keep for what you like. Your handkerchiefs and gloves go into the left-hand small drawer.”
Nurse was by this time locking the box.
“They’re in, Nurse. Everything is. It’s finished,” replied Betty, longing for praise from this stern critic.
“‘In,’ you say? Let me see. Now why waste time by saving it to do nothing in? That’s what you’ve done. Hurry-scurried over the business and don’t know where your things are. Tell me without looking inside now, which end of the drawer did you put your Sunday gloves?”
“I—” Betty stood still, unable to remember.
“You don’t know. I don’t blame you to-day. But you’ll arrange this differently, I hope, before I’ve done with you. We’ve all got the same amount of time—all the time there is! Some of you think that if you hurry-scurry over what you’ve got to do, that you save some of it for something else. They’ve generally wasted it instead, as they find out! Now there’s ten minutes of the half-hour left before the rest come up, so you can take your things out of this drawer and lay them in again. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place,’ may be an old-fashioned proverb in some places,” finished up Nurse, “but not at St. Benedick’s. And neither is the tale of the ‘Hare and Tortoise.’ It comes true here every day!”
There was much wisdom in Nurse’s words. In her own characteristic way she was voicing, as Betty somehow realized, the spirit that lay under the school motto. The new girl slowly and methodically did as she was told while Nurse stood looking on. Anyhow, so she told herself, she was already learning one way of being like the rest of the girls!
For how different the drawers looked from those in her bedroom chest at home. A muddled jumble of her own things and Jill’s had generally to be stirred round about before an odd glove, or a possible bootlace, or a cleaner handkerchief could be found. Even while Nurse’s first words of commendation were sounding in Betty’s ears, even although she was beginning to feel herself more like the rest, Betty’s heart gave a terrible thump of longing for home.
It was at that juncture that “the rest” came upstairs to bed—each of the two dormitory companions with whom she had not as yet made friends, evidently as keen to know Betty as Geraldine had been.