‘The Canon never said anybody was to have enough cheek for two people, anyhow,’ returned Angela, rather feebly. She generally ended in coming off the worse in a battle of words with Barbara. On this occasion, however, she had the junior playroom with her.
‘You shouldn’t joke about serious things, Barbara Berkeley,’ said Mary Wells, disapprovingly.
‘Barbara Berkeley thinks she can laugh at everything!’ cried Angela, with renewed courage.
Miss Smythe came up at the same moment and put the crowning touch on Barbara’s discomfiture by examining the luckless flannel petticoat and disclosing the fact that she had sewed it up all the way round.
‘How do you expect a child is going to get into that?’ asked the needlework mistress, holding up the misshapen garment to the derision of the whole room.
Barbara accepted the criticism and the laughter with equal unconcern. She had never supposed that any child was going to get into a petticoat that only existed for her express torture and the witticisms of Miss Smythe. It had been unpicked so often that it would scarcely hold the large, uneven stitches she repeatedly put into it; and she took up the scissors and began to undo it all over again as a necessary part of the evening’s proceedings. Hardly, however, had she snipped at the first piece of cotton, than she was assailed on both sides by eager helpers, thirsting for the painful pleasures of self-sacrifice.
‘Let me do it for you, Babe!’ exclaimed Angela, quite forgetting their recent dispute on the very subject of the virtue she now was so anxious to exploit.
‘No, let me,’ begged Mary Wells on the other side.
Barbara looked from one to the other doubtfully. The Canon had said nothing about complications of this kind. Then Mary took the decision and the flannel petticoat simultaneously out of her hands.
‘Do, there’s a dear,’ she said coaxingly. ‘Think how I helped you with your German the day before yesterday.’