Just as disconcerting was her performance in geography. Had they tested her in her knowledge of the United States she might have come out triumphantly commonplace; but unfortunately they chose to ask her of Scotland, and there her latest teacher had been Kate.
“What are the chief towns in Scotland?” asked Miss Jean.
“Oban, and Glasgow, and ’Tornoway,” replied Bud with a touch of Highland accent; and, tired of sitting so long in one place, calmly rose and removed herself to a seat beside the Fauntleroy boy, who was greatly put about at such a preference.
“You mustn’t move about like that, Lennox,” explained Miss Amelia, taking her back. “It’s not allowed.”
“But I was all pins and needles,” said Bud frankly, “and I wanted to speak to Percy.”
“My dear child, his name’s not Percy, and there’s no speaking in school,” exclaimed the distressed Miss Amelia.
“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 demoralising 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.