e. I should have
thought you were clever if I had only heard you talk, and not known
what a duffer you are at your lessons."

"Well, she's not a duffer at thorough bass anyway," Rosa put in. "She
only began this term, and she's a long way ahead even of some of the
first. Old Tom's given her a little book to herself."

"I began thorough bass with the rest of you," Beth observed. "It's the
only thing we started fair in. You are years ahead of me in all the
other work."

The girls reflected upon this for a little.

"And you can write themes," Rosa finally asseverated.

"Oh, that's nothing," Beth protested. "Themes are easy enough. I could
write them for the whole school."

"Well, that's no reason why you should put your nose in your cup every
time you drink," Lucy Black, the sharpest shrimp of a girl in the
class, said, grinning.

"I never did such a thing in my life," Beth exclaimed, turning
crimson. "You'll say I eat audibly next."

"No, you don't do that," Rosa said solemnly; "but you do put your nose
in your cup."

The colour flickered on Beth's sensitive cheek, and she shrank into
herself.

"There, don't tease her!" Mary Wright, the eldest, stupidest, and most
motherly girl in the school, exclaimed. "How can you drink without
putting your nose in your cup, stupid?"

Then Beth saw it and smiled, greatly relieved. This venerable
pleasantry was a sign that she had been taken once for all into the
good graces of her schoolmates. The girls who were liked were usually
nicknamed and always chaffed; the rest were treated with different
degrees of politeness, the dockyard girls, as the lowest of all, being
called miss, even by the teachers.

On Thursday evenings the girls in the fifth and sixth were allowed to
do fancy work for an hour while a story-book was read aloud to them,
either by Miss Smallwood or one of themselves when her voice was
tired. The book was always either childish or dull, generally both,
and Beth, who had been accustomed to Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray,
grew restive under the infliction. One evening when she had twice been
reprimanded for yawning aggressively, she exclaimed, "Well, Miss
Smallwood, it is such silly stuff! Why, I could tell you a better
story myself, and make it up as I go on."

"Then begin at once and tell it," said Miss Smallwood, glancing round
at the girls, who smiled derisively, thinking that Beth would have to
excuse herself and thereby tacitly acknowledge that she h