"That's what I can't make out. That's the maddening part of it. Do you think I'm such a failure? Do you think I'm not to be trusted? I get on with the children--they work well! Truly, Clare, I don't know why she dislikes me so. You'd think she was trying to worry me into leaving."
"You should have told me before," said Clare curtly, and changed the subject so abruptly that Alwynne feared she was angry, and wished that she had held her tongue.
She was right. Clare was angry. Clare had conveniently forgotten her little conversation with Henrietta on that panic-stricken summer day: was naturally surprised and indignant to find it bearing the fruit she had intended it to bear. This was what came of confiding in people! And Henrietta, she had no doubt, would be prepared to give chapter and verse for her surveillance, if Clare should, directly or indirectly, call it in question.... Henrietta would appear to have Clare in a cleft stick: and Alwynne was to suffer in consequence. Clare (a great deal fonder of Alwynne than she, or Alwynne, or any one save Elsbeth, guessed) laughed to herself, once, softly, and her eyes snapped. Wait a while, Henrietta ... wait a wee while!
Thoughtfully she approached the question of the counter-attack. That was inevitable, a sop to her own conscience. Besides, it would be amusing.... It was necessary, however, to decide upon the weapon.
It was a small matter--the refusal of a boarder for lack of space--that provided it. Quietly, she went to work.
For the first time, for her own departments had allowed her energy its outlet, she set herself to disentangle the lines on which the school was run. She found many knots. Half day, half boarding school, grown from a timid beginning into one of the most flourishing of its kind, it was, indeed, like the five hundred-year-old town in which it stood, a marvellous compound of ancient custom and modern usage. The "Seminary for Young Ladies" of the 'seventies was three parts obliterated by the 'nineties High School regimen, on which, in its turn, was superimposed the cricket and hockey of the twentieth century's effemination of the public-school system; the whole swollen, patchwork concern held together by the personality of its creator, and its own reputation.