“Because I intend to deal with Life,” I said. “I shall deal with real Things, and not the way we think them. I am young, but I have thought a great deal. I shall minse nothing.”
“Look here, Miss Barbara,” Hannah said, all at once, “what are you doing with this whiskey Flask? And these socks? And—you come right here, and tell me where you got the things in this Suitcase.”
I stocked over to the bed, and my blood frose in my vains. It was not mine.
Words cannot fully express how I felt. While fully convinsed that there had been a mistake, I knew not when or how. Hannah was staring at me with cold and accusing eyes.
“You’re a very young Lady, Miss Barbara,” she said, with her eyes full of Suspicion, “to be carrying a Flask about with you.” I was as puzzled as she was, but I remained calm and to all apearances Spartan.
“I am young in years,” I remarked. “But I have seen Life, Hannah.”
Now I meant nothing by this at the time. But it was getting on my nerves to be put in the infant class all the time. The Xmas before they had done it, and I had had my revenge. Although it had hurt me more than it hurt them, and if I gave them a fright I gave myself a worse one. As I said at that time:
Oh, what a tangeled web we weive,
When first we practice to decieve.
Sir Walter Scott.
Hannah gave me a horrafied Glare, and dipped into the Suitcase again. She brought up a tin box of Cigarettes, and I thought she was going to have delerium tremens at once.
Well, at first I thought the girls at school had played a Trick on me, and a low down mean Trick at that. There are always those who think it is funny to do that sort of thing, but they are the first to squeel when anything is done to them. Once I put a small garter Snake in a girl’s muff, and it went up her sleave, which is nothing to some of the things she had done to me. And you would have thought the School was on fire.