‘She told a story the very day she arrived,’ chimed in Angela from behind. ‘A girl who could do that would do anything.’
‘Can’t you leave the child alone?’ suggested Charlotte Bigley, who happened to be listening. ‘She seems such a harmless infant to me. I don’t believe she even knows she is supposed to be in disgrace.’
It required a good deal of courage to stand up alone against all the girls in the junior playroom, and Charlotte flushed a little when they all laughed at her.
‘That’s where her artfulness comes in,’ declared Jean. She thought she heard her rival’s voice on the other side of the curtain, and jealousy made her more bitter than before. ‘If you ask me, I believe she only pretends not to notice any of us, so as to pick up everything she can; and then she goes and sneaks it all to the elder ones.’
‘Oh, Jean!’ remonstrated Charlotte.
Jean looked a tiny bit ashamed of herself. It was not nearly so easy to say unkind things about the new girl as it had been a week ago. All the same, her unhappiness at the continued coldness of Margaret Hulme was quite genuine, and it hurt her sorely to think that the head girl was now smiling on the interloper as she used to smile upon her.
‘Well, it’s true!’ she vowed. ‘I vote we don’t leave her alone, or give her the chance of mocking at us, any more. She wants to be taught that she’s the youngest girl in the school, and that it isn’t anything to be cocky about. Anybody who likes can make up to her, as the big girls do; but I am going to see that she keeps in her place.’
‘What a fuss to make about an innocent brat like that,’ remarked Charlotte, smiling scornfully. ‘It’s jealousy, because Margaret is kind to her: that’s all it is!’
That was decidedly what it was, but it did not soothe Jean’s temper to be told so in this blunt manner; and by the time her rival came in from the seniors’ room, the enemy had been worked up into a fine state of resentment against her. Unconscious as ever that there was anything unusual in the atmosphere of the junior playroom, Barbara slipped through the girls who were standing about, and reached her footstool and her letter almost before they noticed that she had returned. There seemed to be some wrangling going on between Jean Murray and Charlotte; but Jean Murray was always wrangling with some one about something, and Babs paid no more attention to it than to the sudden hush that followed as she dropped down in her old position on the floor. It was a good thing, she thought, that nobody talked just then, because there was so little time left in which to finish her letter. She took up the pages she had written and glanced over them.
‘Thank you awfuly much for your advice,’ she had scrawled in her large childish hand. ‘I am cheering up lots and now that I don’t take any notice of the girls and their awfull siliness it is quite nice being here but not nearly so nice as being at home with you and father all of which is now burried for ever alass in my past. I don’t hate girls like I did at first. At first they were always bothering and asking quesstions and being inquissitive but now they leave me alone and never talk except when they want the salt or the butter or haven’t heard the number of the psarm at prayers or can’t do their algibra I have lots of algibra to do because girls aren’t good at algibra I don’t think so I always do their algibra for them. Girls are no fun like boys but as long as they don’t say horible things to me like they did at first I think I shall be able to bear them all right but its rather dull excep when we play hockey I’m getting on at hockey Hurly-Burly says and she says I shall play in matches some day and she’s a brick and I like her. We haven’t had any gym yet because the gymnasiam is being painted but we’re going to begin to-morrow and I’m longing to begin they can’t laugh at my short skirts at gym because everybody’s skirt is short at gym and its red and very becomming Ruth says Ruth is Ruth Oliver and she’s a big girl and she hooks up my frocks and kisses me she kisses me rather a lot but it’s Ruth Oliver so I can put up with it. School is very nice when it’s games or algibra or latin but it’s horrid when its dictation or geography or coppies Finny says I must try so I am trying but I wish I wasn’t such an ignorrant girl I heard Jean Murray say yesterday I was the most ignorrant girl that ever came inside this house but praps that was because I had seventeen speling faults.’