"Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That's all she's fit for. Spreading disgusting stories about people who've been kind to her. They probably only asked her there out of charity. She's as poor as dirt."
"Wants her bottom smacked—that's what I say!"
Thus Maria, and, with her, Kate Horner.
Tilly was cooler and bitterer. "I was a dashed fool ever to believe a word. I might have known her little game. She? Why, when I took her out to see my cousin Bob, she couldn't say bo to a goose. He laughed about her afterwards like anything; said she ought to have come in a perambulator, with a nurse.—YOU make anyone in love with you—you!" And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.
"What have they been saying to you, Laura?" whispered Chinky, pale and frightened. "Whatever is the matter?"
"Mind your own business and go away," sobbed Laura.
"I am, I'm going," said Chinky humbly.—"Oh, Laura, I WISH you had that ring."
"Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it," cried Laura, maddened.—And retreating to a lavatory, which was the only private place in the school, she wept her full.
They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain, straightforward, thumping order. What they could not forgive, or get over, was the extraordinary circumstantiality of the fictions which with she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies with such proficiency meant that you had been born with a criminal bent.—And as a criminal she was accordingly treated.
Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.