"She's bin' thumpin' you again, 'as she?" she said with a grin. "Wot 'a ye bin' doin' now?"
"What business is that of yours?" said Beth defiantly. It was bad enough to be beaten, but it was much worse to have Harriet peeping in to gloat over her humiliation. Harriet was not to be snubbed, however. She went up to the piano and looked at the music.
"It's precious hard, I should think," she remarked.
"It's not hard," Beth answered positively, "if anybody tells you what you don't know and can't make out for yourself. I always remember when I'm told or shown how to do it; but what's the use of staring at a sign you've never seen before? Just you look at that! Can you make anything out of it?" Harriet approached, and, after staring at the sign curiously for some time, shook her head. "Of course not," said Beth, snatching up her music, and throwing it on the floor; "and neither can anybody else. It isn't fair."
Bernadine had begun her lessons by this time in the next room, and Mrs. Caldwell suddenly began to scold again. "Oh, that awful voice!" Beth groaned aloud, her racked nerves betraying her.
"She's catchin' it now!" said Harriet, after listening with interest. She seemed to derive some sort of gratification from the children's troubles. "But don't you bother any more, Miss Beth.—Your ma'll 'ave forgotten all about it by goin'-out time—or she'll pertend she 'as to save 'erself trouble. Come and 'elp us wi' the beds."
Beth rose slowly from the piano-stool, and followed Harriet upstairs to the bedroom at the back of the house. She was at once attracted to the open window by an uproar of voices—"the voices of children in happy play." There was a girls' day-school next door kept by the Misses Granger. Miss Granger had called on Mrs. Caldwell as soon as she was settled in her house, to beg for the honour of being allowed to educate her three little girls, and Beth had assisted at the interview with serious attention. It would have been the best thing in the world for her had she been allowed to romp and learn with that careless, happy, healthy-minded crew of respectable little plebeians; but Mrs. Caldwell would never have dreamt of sending any of her own superior brood to associate with such people, even if she could have afforded it. She politely explained to Miss Granger that she was educating her children herself for the present; and it was then, with a sickening sense of disappointment, that Beth rejected her mother's social standard, with its "vulgar exclusiveness," once for all.
She hung out of the window now, heedless of Harriet's appeals to be "'elped wi' the beds," and watched the games going on in the next garden with pathetic gravity. The girls were playing rounders among the old fruit-trees on the grass-plot, with a loud accompaniment of shrieks and shouts of laughter. They tumbled up against the trees continually, and shook showers of autumn leaves down upon themselves; and then, tiring of the game, they began to pelt each other with the leaves, and laughed and shrieked still louder. Some of them looked up and made faces at Beth, but she did not acknowledge the discourtesy. She knew that they were not ladies, but did not feel, as her mother did, that this was a fault for which they should be punished, but a misfortune, rather, for which she pitied them, and she would have liked to have made it up to them by knowing them. Suddenly she remembered that Aunt Victoria was coming back that day, which was something to look forward to. She took Harriet's duster, and went to see if the old lady's room was all in order for her, and arranged as she liked it. Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down on the piano-stool, and rage and rebellion uprose in her heart. The piece of music still lay on the floor, and she stamped her foot on it. As she did so, her mother came into the room.
"Do you know your lesson?" she demanded.
"No, I do not," said Beth, and then she doubled her fist, and brought it down bang on the keyboard.