“No speaking! Why, you're speaking all the time,” said the child. “It ain't—isn't fair. Can't I just get speaking a wee teeny bit to that nice girl over there?”
The twins looked at each other in horror: the child was a thousand times more difficult than the worst her aunt had led them to expect. A sudden unpleasant impression that their familiar pupils seemed like wooden models beside her, came to them both. But they were alarmed to see that the wooden models were forgetting their correct deportment under the demoralizing influence of the young invader.
Once more they dived behind the black-board and communed.
There were many such instances during the day. Bud, used for all her thinking years to asking explanations of what she did not understand, never hesitated to interrogate her teachers, who seemed to her to be merely women, like her mother, and Mrs. Molyneux, and Auntie Ailie, only a little wilted and severe, grotesque in some degree because of their funny affected manner, and the crochet that never was out of their hands in oral exercises. She went further, she contradicted them twice, not rudely, but as one might contradict her equals.
“You talk to her,” said Miss Jean behind the blackboard where they had taken refuge again. “I declare I'll take a fit if this goes on! Did you ever hear of such a creature?”
Miss Amelia almost cried. All her fixed ideas of children were shattered at a blow. Here was one who did not in the least degree fit in with the scheme of treatment in the doo-cot. But she went forward with a look of great severity.
“Of course, coming from America and all that, and never having been at school before, you don't know,” she said, “but I must tell you that you are not behaving nicely—not like a nice little girl at all, Lennox. Nice little girls in school in this country listen, and never say anything unless they're asked. They are respectful to their teachers, and never ask questions, and certainly never contradict them, and—”
“But, please, Miss Duff, I wasn't contradicting,” explained Bud, very soberly, “and when respect is called for, I'm there with the goods. You said honor was spelled with a 'u,' and I guess you just made a mistake, same as I might make myself, for there ain't no 'u' in honor, at least in America.”
“I—I—I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia, gasping.
“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.