"Go on, my dear," she said. "If I give as much time to the others as you are taking, I shall not get through the new girls to-night."
Beth finished her dictation.
"What a hand!" Miss Bey exclaimed. "Wherever did you learn to write like that?"
"I taught myself to write small on purpose," Beth replied. "You can get so much more on to the paper."
"You had better have taught yourself to spell, then," Miss Bey rejoined. "There are four mistakes in this one passage."
Beth balanced her pencil on her finger with an air of indifference. She was wondering how it was that the head-mistress of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters used the word "wherever" as the vulgar do.
The examination concluded with some questions in history and geography, which Beth answered more or less incorrectly.
"I shall put you here in the sixth," Miss Bey informed her; "but rather for your size than for your acquirements. There is a delicate girl, much smaller than you are, in the first."
"Then I'd rather be myself, tall and strong, in the sixth," Beth rejoined. "If I don't catch her up, at all events I shall have more pleasure in life, and that's something."
Again Miss Bey gazed at her; but she was too much taken aback by Beth's readiness to correct her on the instant, although it was an unaccustomed and a monstrous thing for a girl to address a mistress in an easy conversational way, let alone differ from her.