“And you’ve all known me, and made a fuss over me, for a year, and thought I was a lady,” she said mockingly, looking round at them with slow scorn. “You can’t even discover a lady for yourselves. You have to wait to be told that she isn’t one. But half of you,” she cried, glancing at them one after another contemptuously, “will be like that as long as you live. You’ll always belong to some one. You’ll be afraid to be yourselves. There! now you know who my father is, and you may do just as you like about ‘knowing’ me, as you call it. Half of you I shouldn’t care to know if I wasn’t obliged; not because of what your fathers are, but because of what you are,—a set of silly, tame sheep, who daren’t think for yourselves!”
She paused breathless and shaking, her eyes blazing. There was a moment’s awkward silence, and then Helen Mansfield, the head girl, moved from the door which she had entered just as the discussion began, and came forward.
“Bid,” she said carelessly, in her usual self-possessed voice, as though nothing had happened, “will you come and help me see to the lockers? It’s my week, and there’s such a lot to do.”
She put her arm round the girl’s waist, not effusively, but in ordinary school-girl fashion, and they left the room together.
Helen Mansfield had a certain vogue at Myrtle House. On points of etiquette she set the fashion. She was “awfully good style.”
The set of the tide was immediately discernible. Lena Mildmay, indeed, went off with her special satellite, murmuring scornfully that “it was coming to something when you never knew who you might be associating with,” and she should “write home about it;” but the others failed to respond.
Throughout the whole of preparation, surreptitious notes, which caused Bridget to writhe, continued to be passed to her, as she sat doggedly working sums, her curly hair hiding her face.
“Darling Bid, will you walk to church with me on Sunday?”
“My dearest Bridget, I’m not a sheep, am I? I’m sure your father must be a very nice gentleman. Here are some chocolate almonds; but eat them quietly, because they scrunch, and old Ruggles hears quickly.”
“My darling Bid, don’t tell any one. My father is a wine-merchant,—something like yours, you see; only, of course, it’s wine. But still, you see, I couldn’t mind much about your father. Besides,—you’ll never tell, will you?—my uncle is a socialist, and mother says it’s a disgrace.”