‘Everybody has heard of my father’s book, though, so that shows how little you know about it,’ replied Barbara. ‘The people in America liked his book so much that they asked him to go all the way to America to lecture about it. The people in America never asked your father––’
‘Is your father called Everard Berkeley?’ asked Jean, suddenly. She had not listened to grown-up conversations in the Christmas holidays for nothing, and she thought she saw her way at last to crushing the irrepressible new girl, once and for all.
Babs nodded. She was too proud to say anything. What other girl in the room had a father who was so celebrated that people knew him by his Christian name, instead of calling him just Mr. Somebody? She had only a short time in which to enjoy her triumph, however, for Jean Murray turned quickly on her heel, and walked off with a swaggering step.
‘Then my father says that your father is a failure over here,’ she answered, tossing her head contemptuously. ‘Nobody will read his old book in England; so he was obliged to go to America.’
The other girls were beginning to notice the dispute, and they came crowding round to hear what it was all about. Most of them were in time to see Jean Murray walk off with her head in the air, just as the little new girl clenched her fists and crouched down as if to make a spring. Then the storm broke, and the Babe’s fury was let loose among the fifty-five occupants of the junior playroom.
It was an easy matter, in that spring forward, to send some half dozen or so spinning out of her way, but Barbara did not stop to see what happened to them. All she wanted to do was to reach the arch offender of them all, the one who had dared to slight her father, and to hold him up to the ridicule of fifty-five girls.
Nobody quite knew what did happen on this unexampled occasion in the annals of Wootton Beeches; and certainly nobody stirred a finger to put a stop to it. All that the girls in the senior playroom could tell about it afterwards was that a sudden scuffle and several screams broke the hush and hum of voices on the other side of the curtain; and then Angela Wilkins dashed through the archway with a terrified look on her face, and seized Margaret by the arm.
‘Oh, come! do come!’ she sobbed out in her fright. ‘Barbara Berkeley has got Jean Murray down on the floor, and she’s killing her!’