It was seldom the commander-in-chief of the establishment swept her silken flounces through the hot, dusty classe; and now, according to the long-established rule, teachers and pupils rose simultaneously, and courtesied profoundly to that august lady. Then every eye in sixty-three heads turned and fixed themselves upon the new pupil with that sharp, searching, unpitying stare that only school-girls understand. Petronilla, however, was not in the remotest degree troubled with that disagreeable failing, yclept bashfulness; and glancing round composedly, she swept the whole room at a glance, and returned every stare with compound interest.
“Young ladies,” said Mrs. Moodie, with a graceful wave of her hand toward Pet, “this young lady is Miss Petronilla Lawless, of Judestown, and will be your future companion and fellow-pupil. I hope you will be mutually pleased with each other, and try to make her at home among you as soon as possible. Miss Sharpe she will enter your division.”
And, with a stately bow of her beribboned head, Mrs. Moodie rustled loudly from the room, while teachers and pupils again bowed in deepest reverence.
Pet gave an assenting nod to Mrs. Moodie’s remarks, which had the effect of making two or three of the young ladies, indulge in a little giggle behind their handkerchiefs. Then, from a distant corner, came a small, keen, wiry-looking human terrier, known by the appropriate cognomen of Miss Sharpe, who immediately laid hands upon Pet, saying:
“Miss Lawless, come this way. You are to enter my class.”
Pet, as good a physiognomist as ever lived, raised her keen eyes to the cantankerous face of the cross-looking old young lady, and conceived, upon the spot, a most intense dislike to her. The other girls, at a silent motion from their teachers, had dropped into their seats, and resumed their studies—still, however, covertly watching the new pupil with all a schoolgirl’s curiosity.
Pet was led by sharp Miss Sharpe to the remote corner from whence she had issued, and where sat some dozen or two “juvenile ladies,” all smaller than Pet. Miss Lawless looked at them a moment in indisguised contempt, and then stopped short, jerked herself free from Miss Sharpe’s grasp, and coming to a sudden stand-still, decidedly began:
“I ain’t a-going to sit among them there little things. I want to go over there!”
And she pointed to where a number of young ladies, whose ages might have varied from seventeen to twenty, sat in the “First Division.”
A very little thing will produce a laugh in a silent school-room, where the pupils are ever ready to laugh at anything a new scholar does or says; and the effect of this brief speech was a universal burst of subdued laughter from the sixty “young ladies” aforesaid.