s ran, not coherently or explicitly, but in vehement
revolts and resolves. Thus she ruminated, while Miss Jubb was out of the
room or had her attention so distracted that she could not observe an
idle apprentice. When Miss Jubb came back to the room or to supervision
work had a little to be hurried, so that she might not find occasion for
complaint. For Miss Jubb had a sharp tongue, and although she took the
pins out of her mouth before she talked she showed that they had left
their influence upon her tongue, which was sharp to a fault. And there,
across the room, was the rosy-cheeked May Pearcey, so silly, so
incapable of more than momentary resentment, that she was always
forgetting that Sally and she no longer spoke, but was always trying to
encourage Sally into a return to their former relation. Sometimes Sally
would glower across at May, bitterly hating her and riddling her
plumpness and folly with the keen eye of malice. May, unconscious of the
scrutiny, would go on with her work, self-satisfied, much coarser and
more physical in her appetites than Sally, still in spite of all the
rebuffs she had received grinning about her boys and what they had said
and what they had meant....

"Oo, he is awful!" she would burst out to Sally. "The things he said. I
dint half blush."

May had enjoyed his boldness, it seemed. She told Sally what he had
said. She told her things and things in the irresistible splurge of the
silly girl whose mind is full of adolescent impurity. Well, Sally knew
all that. She knew all the things that boys said; and a few more things
she had noticed and thought for herself. She was not a prude. May didn't
know anything that Sally did not know; but she talked about it. Sally
did not talk. Her sexual knowledges, so far as they went, were as close
and searching as a small-tooth comb, and collected as much that was
undesirable. She despised May. May was a fool. She was soppy, talking
about all these things as if they were new marvels, when they were as
old as the hills and as old as the crude coquetries of boys and girls.
May was the soppiest girl in Holloway. Yet the boys liked her for her
plump face and arms and legs, and her red cheeks, and her self-conscious
laugh, and her eyes that held guilt and evil and general silliness
and vanity. The boys liked May. They did not like Sally. She was too
small and sandy; too obviously critical and contemptuous in face of
their small stock of talk, and too greedy