“Flowers again, Miss Ruan!” one of them exclaimed. “You get a great many more than your share.”
“Oh, Miss Ruan!” exclaimed Miss Yarvis, apologetically. She was a middle-aged lady, with a worried expression, and spectacles. “I was obliged to give an order mark in your form this morning. Beatrice Mandy was so excessively tiresome that she left me no alternative. I’m extremely sorry.”
“You speak as though you’d signed a death-warrant!” said Bridget lightly. “I suppose she forgot her pencil, or something?”
“Oh, my dear Miss Ruan! Beatrice Mandy? She’s the trial of my life,” Miss Harding broke in, volubly. “She’s a dreadful child! I’m worn out with her,—worn out! Corporal punishment is the only thing for children like that, in spite of all the nonsense that—”
“It’s moral influence that is required, Miss Harding,” interrupted one of the teachers, looking up from the pile of exercise-books she was correcting at the middle table.
Miss Harding and Miss Brown did not love one another, and Miss Brown’s tone sufficiently indicated the fact. Miss Harding reddened angrily, and an animated argument on the subject of personal chastisement versus the ameliorating influence of the True Teacher (Miss Harding, by implication, not answering to that description) was soon in full swing.
“Miss Ruan, have you begun the History for the Cambridge yet?—because I haven’t; and how the Third will ever get through it, I don’t know,” sighed Miss Miles resignedly. “They know absolutely nothing of the Tudor Period, and as to the Stuarts—”
Bridget had heard precisely similar remarks at lunch time for the past three months. To-day they seemed to her more than ordinarily trivial and unmeaning. “I wonder if it’s like this in the real world?” she thought, as she re-entered her class-room. “All this fuss over trifles; and the real things—the vital things—always, always untouched!”
At half-past seven, she was climbing the stairs leading to the orchestra.