Here Miss Tredgold placed a primer before each child, and she and Verena retired into the bay-window. They came out again at the end of ten minutes. Verena's cheeks were crimson, and Miss Tredgold decidedly wore a little of her northeast air. Pauline, on the whole, had a more successful interview with her new governess than her sister. She was smarter and brighter than Verena in many ways. But before the morning was over Miss Tredgold announced that all her pupils were shamefully ignorant.
"I know more about you now than I did," she said. "You will all have to work hard. Verena, you cannot even read properly. As to your writing, it is straggling, uneven, and faulty in spelling."
The rest of the day passed in a subdued state. The girls hardly knew themselves. They felt as though tiny and invisible chains were surrounding them. These chains pulled them whenever they moved. They made their presence felt when they spoke, when they sat down, and when they rose up. They were with them at dinner; they were with them whenever Miss Tredgold put in an appearance. Perhaps they were silken chains, but, all the same, they were intensely annoying. Verena was the most patient of the nine. She said to her sisters:
"We have never had any discipline. I was reading the other day in one of mother's books that discipline is good. It is the same thing as when you prune the fruit trees. Don't you remember the time when John got a very good gardener from Southampton to come and look over our trees? The gardener said, 'These trees have all run to wood; you must prune them.' And he showed John how, and we watched him. Don't you remember, girls?"
"Oh, don't I!" said Pauline. "And he cut away a lot of the little apples, and hundreds of tiny pears, and a lot of lovely branches; and I began to cry, and I told him he was a horrid, horrid man, and that I hated him."
"Oh, he got ruder than ever! He said, 'If I was your pa I'd do a little pruning on you.' Oh, wasn't I angry!"
"But think a little more," she said. "Don't you remember the following year how splendid the pears were? And we had such heaps of apples; and the gooseberries and raspberries were equally fine. We didn't hate the man when we were eating our delicious fruit."