“If you like, mother. But I can go alone all right.” She was a brick. She guessed what I hoped she would say, and she said it.
“Well, I’ll be looking out for you at tea-time, dear boy,” said she. And she patted my arm lovingly as I started on.
I wished those fellows could have heard her voice and seen her kind face. She treated me like a man—which was more than could be said for them.
I went on my way soothed in my ruffled spirits. But my perturbation revived when I stood on the doorstep of the Girls’ High School, and rang the head mistress’s bell. It was a bitter pill, I can tell you, for a fellow who had once been caned by Plummer for practising on the horizontal bar without the mattress underneath to fall on.
Miss Bousfield was a shrewd, not disagreeable-looking little body, who saved me all the trouble of self-introduction by knowing who I was and why I came.
“Well, Jones,” said she—I liked that, I had dreaded she would call me Tommy—“here you are. How is your mother? Why, what a state your hair is in! I really think you’d like to go into the cloak room; you’ll find a brush and comb there. It looks as if your hair were standing on end with horror at me, you know.”
Little she knew what my hair was on end about. I was almost grateful to her for the way she put it, and meekly retired to the cloak room, where—I confess it—with a long-tailed girl’s comb, and a soft brush, and a big looking-glass, I contrived to restore my truant locks to their former masculine order.
When I returned to the room. Miss Bousfield was sitting at a table, at which was also seated a young lady of about twenty, with an exercise book and dictionary in front of her.
Was it a trap? Was I to be taught along with the girls after all? Miss Bousfield evidently divined my perturbation and hastened to explain.
“Miss Steele, this is Master Jones, who is going to read Latin with us. Miss Steele is one of my teachers, Jones, and we three are going to brush up our classics together, you see.”