Lettice was right. Honor was certainly in a most unenviable frame of mind. She considered that Vivian had treated her unfairly in assuming her to be guilty without making any proper investigation.
"It's the first time a Fitzgerald has ever been called a coward!" she said to Janie.
The word rankled in her memory even more than the monitress's high-handed manner.
"Then you must use every opportunity of showing that you're the reverse," replied Janie. "You'll have to live the thing down. I expect the truth will come round to Vivian's ears in course of time, and I'm sure that she'll think far better of you than if we had gone at once to her with a long accusation against Flossie. If Flossie herself had offered to tell, that would have been different; but she didn't rise to such a pitch of heroism."
"One wouldn't expect it from Flossie Taylor!" said Honor contemptuously, as she hurried off to her music lesson.
I am afraid Honor's scales that day were anything but a satisfaction to Fräulein Bernhardt, the piano teacher. Her mind was so abstracted that she kept continually playing wrong fingering, or even an occasional wrong note in the harmonic minors. Her study was little better, and her piece a dead failure. The mistress, with characteristic German patience, set her to work to try to conquer a couple of difficult phrases, through which Honor stumbled again and again, each time with the same old mistakes, until the end of the half-hour.
"I find you not yet fit to take share in ze evening pairformance!" sighed poor Fräulein, whose musical ear had been much distressed by this mangling of her favourite tarantella. "Zere must be more of improvement before ve render ze piece to Mees Maitland. You say you not vish to play in publique? Ach, so! Zat is vat zey all say; but it is good to begin young to get over ze fear--vat you call ze 'shyness'--is it not so?"
Fräulein Bernhardt was an excellent teacher--patient, conscientious, and enthusiastic. She tried to inspire all her pupils with her own love for music, and with some indeed she succeeded, though with others it proved a more difficult task.
"I'm almost impossible!" avowed Lettice Talbot. "I believe I'm nearly as bad as the old fellow who declared he only knew two tunes--one was 'God Save the King', and the other wasn't."