“I’m glad you like it, girls,” she said. “There’s a good deal in a name, and I’m never at a loss to think of one. But to come back to the starting-point. The reason one of us ought to get the Bellamy prize is because there’s no one else in the school who is likely to excel us in any thing.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Lily. “We don’t know what the prize is for. May be it’s for patience; if that’s the case some of the smaller girls are just as patient as we are—more so, even. The same with amiability, or good nature, or any of the virtues.”
“Pshaw! That old gentleman wasn’t goody-goody enough to set up a prize for any such stuff,” said Edna. “He knows this isn’t a Sunday-school. No, it’s for superiority in something, I feel sure. May be it’s music, may be it’s languages, or some English studies. I wish I had been here then and heard him myself.”
“If it’s English studies Mary Ann Stubbs has the best chance,” said Lily. “She’s beyond the whole of us.”
“I don’t see,” said Edna, discontentedly, “why it is that common, second-class folks are ’most always so smart at books. May be it’s a sort of compensation for being low-born.”
“What is low-born?” asked Lily in an argumentative sort of way.
“Why, don’t you know? It’s common people.”
“Well, no, I don’t seem to know, in spite of your highly grammatical explanation.”
“O, bother, how fussy you are! What difference does grammar make when one is just talking?” said Edna, irritably.
“My, what a superior person you are, to be able to soar above grammar that way, when I was so stupid as to suppose we couldn’t talk without it! But, to return to our mutton pies, as we say when mademoiselle calls us to the French class, what is low-born?”