“Dear me, Miss Sloman! Bless my heart, that clock is very much too fast,” she would exclaim. “It cannot be nearly so late as that.”
“I think it is quite right, Mrs de Blount,” Miss Sloman would say, twitching her moustache.
“Oh, dear me, no, Miss Sloman; nothing like right. My pendule is quite different.”
Of course we girls nudged one another—that is not a nice word, but kicked or elbowed seems worse; and then, thinking I did not know, Clara whispered to me that her ladyship always went on like that when she was down late of a morning. But I had noticed it several times before; while there it was, always the same tale, and the silly old ostrich never once saw that we could see her when she had run her stupid old head in the sand.
Well, according to rule, she came in, found fault with the clock, but took care not to have it altered to match her gimcrack French affair in her bedroom, which she always called her pendule. Then she climbed on to the daïs; and, as usual, she must be very particular about the arrangement of the folds of her satin dress, which was one of the company or parent-seeing robes, now taken into everyday use.
“Look out,” whispered Clara to me.
“What for?” I said, in the same low tone.
But instead of answering she pretended to be puzzled with something in her lesson, and got up to go and ask Miss Furness what it meant.
All this while Mrs Blunt was getting up and sitting down, and rustling about like an old hen in a dust-bath, to get herself in position; when quite suddenly there was a sharp scream and a crash; and, on jumping up, I could see the lady principal upon the floor behind the dais where she had pulled over the table, and the ink was trickling down upon her neck.
Of course, any lady in her senses would have got up directly, and tried to repair the mischief; but not she: for there she lay groaning as if in terrible pain, as Miss Furness and Miss Sloman, one at either hand, were trying to raise her, the Fraülein the while dragging off the table, and exclaiming in German; but not the slightest impression was made upon the recumbent mass—which seems to me the neatest way of saying “lying-down lump.”