“I want to hear again.”
“To jeer at a fellow, I suppose?”
“I won’t jeer, and I might help you,” she said with a laugh.
He looked at her face dubiously, it was inscrutable enough, but the mockery had left her lips.
“I want to go, I hate to be here, Greggs is a big enough fool but not quite so much as the others, he ain’t all bad, I’ll say that. But what’s he to other boys and cricket and football and larks—oh, you know!”
“I wonder why on earth they let you read Tom Brown when such heaps of books are forbidden,” said Gwen reflectively. “They have brought all this on themselves,” she added, knitting her brows in the exact manner of her mother. “We have to bear what we earn, we hear that often enough, I don’t see why they shouldn’t apply it to themselves. Dacre, you’re an awful ass, if I wanted all those things I should have had them long ago.”
“All very well to say that,” grunted the boy, “I’d like to know how.”
“I’ll tell you,—I’d worry till I got them.”
“I worry pretty well as it is,” he said with a self-satisfied grin.
“Yes, in a stupid squally way—you get into a rage and make a row and an ass of yourself generally, then you get punished and repent, or pretend to,—anyway nothing is heard of you till the next bout. You might be a dead cat for all the importance you are—of course you’re forgotten, and they go on working in peace.