Beth when Amy Wynne had
gone again. "The first-class girls are mothers to us. You walk with
your mother in the garden, and sit with her on half-holidays, and
she's awfully good to you. I advise you to be one of Amy Wynne's
children if you can." She was interrupted by the loud ringing of a
bell in the hall. "That's for tea," Rosa added. "Come, and I'll show
you the way."

The big dining-room was downstairs in the basement, next the kitchen.
Miss Clifford dined in the next room attended by her maids of honour
(the two girls at the top of the first class for the time being) and
the rest of the class except the girls at the bottom, who were
degraded to the second-class table in the big dining-room. Here each
two classes had a separate table, at either end of which a teacher sat
on a Windsor chair. The girls had nothing but hard benches without
backs to sit on. Miss Bey, the housekeeper Miss Winch, and the head
music-mistress, irreverently called Old Tom by the girls, sat at a
separate table, where, at dinner-time, they did all the carving, and
snatched what little dinner they could get in the intervals, patiently
and foolishly regardless of their own digestions. For tea there were
great dishes of thick bread and butter on all the tables, which the
girls began to hand round as soon as grace had been said. Each class
had a big basin of brown sugar to put in the tea, which gave it a
coarse flavour. The first cup was not so bad, but the second was
nothing but hot water poured through the teapot. It was not etiquette
to take more than two. When the girls were ready for a second, they
put pieces of bread in their saucers that they might know their own
again, and passed the cups up to the teacher who poured out tea. If
any girl suspected that the cup returned to her was not her own, she
would not touch the tea. When the meal was over, one of the girls took
the sugar-basin, beat down the sugar in it flat and hard with the
spoon, did a design on the top, and put it away.

"What's that for?" Beth asked.

"That's so that we shall know our own again," Rosa answered. "But it
never lasts the proper time."

"What do you do when it's done?" said Beth.

"Do without," was the laconic rejoinder.

All the girls were talking at once.

"What a racket!" Beth exclaimed.

"It'll be quiet enough to-morrow," Rosa replied. "The first class
talks at table in Miss Clifford's room, but we are not allowed to
speak a word here, except to the te