“Oh!” Bridget shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “Another row! Bedroom untidy or something. I’m reported again; so I thought it was waste of time to listen to all Miss Ruggles’ talk, as well as Miss Brownrigg’s, this evening, and I came away in the middle.”
“Bid!”
“Well, you’d have thought I’d broken all the Ten Commandments, instead of leaving my brush and comb out of the bag! What idiots teachers are! They mix up all the big things with the little ones, as though they were all crimes equally. Oh! a boarding-school’s a beast of an institution! Worry, worry, worry, about trifles from morning till night. And Miss Brownrigg calls this ‘preparation for life.’ Does life mean tidy wardrobes, and words underlined with red ink without any smudges, and sums all worked the way of the book or else they’re not right even when the answers are the same? If so, I don’t think it’s worth preparing for.”
“Miss Ruggles isn’t worth exciting one’s self about,” returned the other girl, calmly.
“Not for you, of course. You haven’t any temper. But I’m not made like that. I go mad. I wish I didn’t.” She flung herself down on the seat beside her friend, and there was silence for a moment.
The sunshine filtered through the chinks in the pine-log roof of the summer-house, and fell in little pools and splashes of light on the table, and on the girls’ summer dresses. Shadows of the lime-trees outside danced lightly, and flickered on the rough walls, and brought a sense of dainty stir and flutter into the arbor.
Presently Bridget moved, and broke into a laugh.
“What a duffer Miss Ruggles is!” she exclaimed, her eyes dancing. “I’m so furious when rows are going on that I don’t notice the absurd things she says; but they come upon me afterwards. Just now, for instance, she said it was ‘my duty to keep my linen-drawer tidy, because Christ might come at any moment.’ I must put that in.”
“In? Where?”
Bridget started, and her color rose. “Oh! never mind!” she began.