"My brain feels like jelly! It _won't_ work. I shall be getting softening of the brain at this rate!" sighed Flora, rubbing her cheeks up and down between her bands until she looked like a fat indiarubber doll. "I keep mixing things up until I don't seem to have a clear idea left, and my mother has set her heart on my taking a good place. She will look sad if I come out bottom, and I do hate and detest people looking sad! I would far rather they scolded, and had done with it!" "My people don't worry their heads about lessons. They sent me to school because they think it polishes a girl, and rubs off the angles, don't you know!" said Lottie, with an air. She was the richest girl in the school, who took all the extras, and put her name down for every concert and entertainment, without thinking of the expense. Her parents had a house in town to which they came regularly every spring, during which season Lottie's friends received many delightful invitations. She had unlimited pocket-money also, and was lavish in gifts to those who happened to be in her favour, a fact which a certain number of girls found it impossible to banish from their minds; and thus Lottie held a little court over which she reigned as queen, while the more earnest- minded of the pupils adored Margaret, and would hear no one compared to the sweet "school-mother." Clara was a Margaret-worshipper, so she felt in duty bound to snub Lottie on this as on every possible occasion. "I don't see much polish about _you_!" she retorted brutally. "And it's ridiculous to come to school at all, if you don't mean to work. If it's only `pruins and prism' you want, why didn't you go to board with a dancing-mistress, and practise how to come in and out of a room, and bow to your friends, and cut your old schoolfellows when you meet them in the road? You'd find it useful, my dear!" The last sentence was a deliberate hit, for a former pupil had reported that, during a visit to a well-known watering-place, when she herself was returning unkempt and sandy from a cockling expedition, she had encountered Lottie walking on the parade with a number of fashionable visitors, and that, after one hasty glance in her direction, Miss Lottie had become so wonderfully interested in what was going on at the other side of the road that she altogether forgot to return her bow. Needless to say, Lottie had been reminded more than once of this incident, so that even Pixie, the newest comer, was familiar with its incidents, though she could not bring herself to believe in such deliberate snobbery. To-day, as Lottie flushed, and Margaret looked a pained reproach, it was Pixie who rushed to the rescue, wriggling about in her seat, and clasping and unclasping her hands in the earnestness of her defence.