"Well, Dorothea, then; you must remember one thing about Miss Marr,—she won't put up with any of your flippant smartness."
"She needn't."
"But, Dorothea, you won't be punished, and you won't be allowed to argue, as you did at Miss Maynard's. It will be like this,—Miss Marr will let you go on and reveal yourself and all your faults without a word of comment, as she would if you were a guest; then if she finds that you or your faults are of the kind that she doesn't care to have in her school, she'll send you home. She says, you know, that her school is neither an infant school, nor a reform school,—that by the time girls are fifteen, they are young ladies enough to have some idea of good breeding, and if they haven't, they are not the sort of girls that she wants in her school. Now remember that, Dorothea."
"I never heard of a school-teacher putting on such airs as this Miss Marr does, in my life. It's always what she wants, what she expects, what she is going to do. I know I shall hate her!"
"Well, if this is the spirit that you propose to start with, it is very easy to foresee the result."
"I don't care."
"Now, Dorothea, you do care. Just think—your name has been on the list for a whole year for this vacancy; and it was your own idea, you know. Nothing would satisfy you but to go to Miss Marr's."
"Oh, I know, I know; don't preach, you dear Molly Polly! I'm not going to fly at Miss Marr and call her an old cat, if I think she's one."
"No, I should say not, but you mustn't fly at a good many things,—at certain rules and regulations, for instance,—and you mustn't take any saucy little liberties, such as you have been in the habit of taking at Miss Maynard's."
"Oh, not a liberty!" smiling and nodding at her elder sister. "I shall pull my face down like this"—drawing down her lips and lowering her eyes—"when I meet the great Miss Marr, and I shall say, in a little bit of a frightened voice like this, 'Oh, Miss Marr, Miss Marr, please don't shut me up in a dark closet and put me on bread and water, whatever I do.'"