The big dining-room was downstairs in the basement, next the kitchen. Miss Clifford dined in the next room attended by her maids of honour (the two girls at the top of the first class for the time being) and the rest of the class except the girls at the bottom, who were degraded to the second-class table in the big dining-room. Here each two classes had a separate table, at either end of which a teacher sat on a Windsor chair. The girls had nothing but hard benches without backs to sit on. Miss Bey, the housekeeper Miss Winch, and the head music-mistress, irreverently called Old Tom by the girls, sat at a separate table, where, at dinner-time, they did all the carving, and snatched what little dinner they could get in the intervals, patiently and foolishly regardless of their own digestions. For tea there were great dishes of thick bread and butter on all the tables, which the girls began to hand round as soon as grace had been said. Each class had a big basin of brown sugar to put in the tea, which gave it a coarse flavour. The first cup was not so bad, but the second was nothing but hot water poured through the teapot. It was not etiquette to take more than two. When the girls were ready for a second, they put pieces of bread in their saucers that they might know their own again, and passed the cups up to the teacher who poured out tea. If any girl suspected that the cup returned to her was not her own, she would not touch the tea. When the meal was over, one of the girls took the sugar-basin, beat down the sugar in it flat and hard with the spoon, did a design on the top, and put it away. "What's that for?" Beth asked. "That's so that we shall know our own again," Rosa answered. "But it never lasts the proper time." "What do you do when it's done?" said Beth. "Do without," was the laconic rejoinder. All the girls were talking at once. "What a racket!" Beth exclaimed. "It'll be quiet enough to-morrow," Rosa replied. "The first class talks at table in Miss Clifford's room, but we are not allowed to speak a word here, except to the teachers, nor in the bedrooms either, once work begins. Do you see that great fat old thing at the mistress's table? That's Old Tom, the head music-mistress. She is a greedy old cat! She likes eating! You can see it by the way she gloats over things, and she's quite put out if she doesn't get exactly what she wants. Fancy caring! It's just like a man; and that's why she's called Old Tom." "Not that she's fastidious!" said Agnes Stewart, a tall slender girl with short crisp black hair and grey-green eyes, who was sitting opposite to Beth. "I believe she likes mutton." "Oh, she's horrid enough for anything!" the girl next her exclaimed with an expression of disgust.