‘Oh, Mary Wells adores you!’ cried Angela, in her effusive manner. ‘She said so directly you broke your leg.’
Barbara puzzled still more. ‘I don’t understand about Margaret Hulme a bit, though,’ she observed. ‘Only the day before the display, she told me I was a little nuisance, because I didn’t hear her the first time she spoke to me; so of course I thought she hated me!’
‘That was before you broke your leg, though,’ explained Jean.
‘She adores you now,’ added Angela.
Kit and Bobbin burst out laughing, but Barbara went on puzzling, and did not notice them. Adoration at Wootton Beeches seemed to spring from the strangest causes. After being more or less neglected for a whole term by the greater part of her school-fellows, it was at least surprising to be suddenly placed on a pinnacle of fame, just because she had broken her leg. If she had only guessed at Angela’s envy of that same broken leg–an envy that was probably shared by half the junior playroom–she might have been still further amazed.
The boys strolled indoors to find Auntie Anna and to beg for tea in the garden; and the conversation under the cedar tree grew more intimate. Jean came out of her shell, and talked about her home in Edinburgh in a way she had never done before, even on half-holidays at school; and Angela, in her turn, gave an elaborate description of her eldest sister’s drawing-room dress, and of the longing it had aroused in her own frivolous little mind to be presented at Court herself.
‘And so I shall be, some day; mother says so!’ she announced, spreading out the folds of her rough serge skirt, and seeing it in imagination many times its length and composed of shimmering satin.
‘I shan’t,’ said Jean, regarding her with scorn. ‘I don’t want to be presented. Any stupid idiot can put on a white satin dress, miles long, and grin at Queen Victoria. I want to be clever like father, and get a degree at college, and lecture to thousands and thousands of people, and––’
‘Oh, don’t be like that, Jean,’ interrupted Barbara, earnestly. ‘If you’re going to give lectures you’ll have to go away from all your children, for months and months and months, and leave them to break all their legs, all by themselves, and–oh, it is so horrible to break your leg all by yourself!’
‘Poor dear,’ said Angela, ready as usual with a tearful and demonstrative sympathy.