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Thank you, love, she said, in a cosy, purring voice. Eat your lollipops, and look at me; Im going to sleep. Please pull my toe when Danesbury comes in. Oh, fie! Prunes and Prisms not so cross eat your lollipops; they will sweeten the expression of that little face.
The last words came out drowsily. As she said face, Miss Drummonds languid eyes were closed she was fast asleep.
Chapter Nine Work And Play
no way. Each day she was shutting herself up more and more from all kindly advances, and the only one in the school whom she sincerely and cordially liked was gentle Cecil Temple.
Mrs Willis had some ideas with regard to the training of her young people which were peculiarly her own. She had found them successful, and, during her thirty years experience, had never seen reason to alter them. She was determined to give her girls a great deal more liberty than was accorded in most of the boarding-schools of her day. She never made what she called impossible rules; she allowed the girls full liberty to chatter in their bedrooms; she did not watch them during play-hours; she never read the letters they received, and only superintended the specimen home letter which each girl was required to write once a month. Other head-mistresses wondered at the latitude she allowed her girls, but she invariably replied
I always find it works best to trust them. If a girl is found to be utterly untrustworthy. I dont expel her, but I request her parents to remove her to a more strict school.
Mrs Willis also believed much in that quiet half-hour each evening, when the girls who cared to come could talk to her alone. On these occasions she always dropped the school-mistress and adopted the rôle of the mother. With a very refractory pupil she spoke in the tenderest tones of remonstrance and affection at these times. If her words failed if the discipline of the day and the gentle sympathy of these moments at night did not effect their purpose, she had yet another expedient the vicar was asked to see the girl who would not yield to this motherly influence.
Mr Everard had very seldom taken Mrs Williss place. As he said to her, Your influence must be the mainspring. At supreme moments I will help you with personal influence, but otherwise, except for my nightly prayers with your girls, and my weekly class, and the teachings which they with others hear from my lips Sunday after Sunday, they had better look to you.
The girls knew this rule well, and the one or two rare instances in the school history where the vicar had stepped in to interfere, were spoken of with bated breath and with intense awe.
Mrs Willis had a great idea of bringing as much happiness as possible into young lives. It was with this idea that she had the quaint little compartments railed off in the play-room.
For the elder girls, she would say, there is no pleasure so great as having, however small the spot, a little liberty hall of their own. In her compartment each girl is absolute monarch. No one can enter inside the little curtained rail without her permission. Here she can show her individual taste, her individual ideas. Here she can keep her most-prized possessions. In short, her compartment in the play-room is a little home to her.
The play-room, large as it was, admitted of only twenty compartments; these compartments were not easily won. No amount of cleverness attained them; they were altogether dependent on conduct. No girl could be the honourable owner of her own little drawing-room until she had distinguished herself by some special act of kindness and self-denial. Mrs Willis had no fixed rule on this subject. She alone gave away the compartments, and she often made choice of girls on whom she conferred this honour in a way which rather puzzled and surprised their fellows.
When the compartment was won it was not a secure possession. To retain it depended also on conduct; and here again Mrs Willis was absolute in her sway. More than once the girls had entered the room in the morning to find some favourites furniture removed and her little possessions taken carefully down from the walls, the girl herself alone knowing the reason for this sudden change. Annie Forest, who had been at Lavender House for four years, had once, for a solitary month of her existence, owned her own special drawing-room. She had obtained it as a reward for an act of heroism. One of the little pupils had set her pinafore on fire. There was no teacher present at the moment the other girls had screamed and run for help, but Annie, very pale, had caught the little one in her arms and had crushed out the flames with her own hands. The childs life was spared, the child was not even hurt, but Annie was in the hospital for a week. At the end of a week she returned to the school-room and play-room as the heroine of the hour. Mrs Willis herself kissed her brow, and presented her in the midst of the approving smiles of her companions with the prettiest drawing-room of the sets. Annie retained her honourable post for one month.