"I'm such a little thing to be punished," she said to herself. "I don't think they ought to punish such a little thing as I am. I must be young when people live to be as old as grandpapa, with wrinkles over every scrap of his face, till it looks just like no face at all, only wrinkles."
Then Bab examined her little round, rosy, pleasant face in a mirror over the fireplace.
"Not a single wrinkle," said she. "I must be very young; but if they punish me this way, I shall get wrinkles. I'm sure I shall, because I'm so miserable!"
I am afraid poor Bab often deserved to be punished. She was idle at her lessons and extremely saucy, and she was a quaint little thing, so that sometimes she seemed to be impertinent when she really did not intend it, though I must own that at other times she did intend it as much as any other young lady seven years old possibly could. On the present occasion, when her governess scolded her for her idleness, she said she had not been idle, but had been making a charade; and then she began dancing about the schoolroom, and jumping on tables and chairs, and all the time shouting loudly, "Selina, guess—this is the charade—guess, Selina, guess! My first is what nobody should be, my second is what everybody should eat, and my whole is—oh,—Strict-ham, Strict-ham. Why don't you guess, Selina? Oh, why don't you?"
Miss Strictham marched her off in dire disgrace. The picnickers would be absent four hours, and during that time Bab was not to quit the schoolroom. Maria, the housemaid, would bring her dinner, and nurse would look in on her now and then, but she was not to have the younger children with her. She was to be a solitary prisoner in solitary confinement, and she was on her parole. Her aunt made her promise not to leave the room, and having done so, was content, for, as she said to Uncle Jem in rather a complaining way, "It is a very odd thing that Bab never tells a falsehood or breaks her promise. Robert and Selina both do sometimes, and yet they are so much better children. Isn't it odd?"
Having enjoyed a good roar, and feeling wonderfully refreshed thereby—for Bab was too proud to have shed a tear in Aunt Anastasia's and Miss Strictham's presence—the poor little thing got hold of her lesson-books and prepared to learn a French verb, some questions and answers in English history, and to do a sum in compound addition, and write a copy.
"As if it mattered to such a little thing as I am whether King John was a good man or a bad one, or what sort of a thing Magna Charta was!" said she, reproachfully, to her book; "as if it mattered to anybody, indeed, when it was such an extremely long time ago! Eleven hundred and ninety-nine he came to the throne; and who'd care if he had never been born or never come to the throne? And we're not barons, and we've not got Magna Charta; and it's all nothing at all, but a great pity it ever happened, for if it hadn't happened, poor little children living hundreds and hundreds of years afterwards would not be troubled about it. I call it rubbish!" and with the word rubbish she tossed the little book up, and down it came with a broken back.
Bab picked it up and held it with one corner. When she saw the melancholy scrambling way in which the cover and the pages hung, she went off into irresistible shouts of laughter—for Bab's laugh was as loud and as hearty as her cry. Then she did her sums and wrote her copy, and after that Maria brought in her dinner.
Bab clapped her hands for joy when she saw what the tray contained, and then she began her dinner.