Even girls have the sense to make unusual efforts to avoid unusual inconveniences, and Miss Strickland’s temper when roused was an unusual inconvenience. She said everything that came into her head against the girl who had failed her, and then, with the sting of a life-long prejudice behind her, everything against the sex which had evolved her. Onoria firmly believed that all girls were deceitful, lazy and vain, and that the only way to deal with them was by repeated castigations of the spirit. Some of her pupils would have done better without these reprisals; most people are supposed to work best under appreciation and do not begin to find themselves until they have the confidence and sympathy of their teachers. Such girls did not do their best work for Onoria; but they worked. All of them worked, feverishly or steadily, to avoid the deluge of her merciless tongue. The level of Onoria’s pupils was high, and as she did not believe in hidden depths, she never had to regret that she had failed to plumb them. “I know exactly what each of my girls can do,” she was fond of saying. What she did not know was what the girls could have done if they hadn’t been hers. “I have never made a friend out of a pupil yet, thank the Lord,” she would end up by saying to her men friends, who spent Sunday afternoons in hearing Onoria undermine the position of women, “and what is more I never will!” The men shook their heads in delighted admiration; they knew they could not say as much for themselves; but they admired Onoria for her security. CHAPTER II Elsie Andrews was exactly the kind of girl Miss Strickland disliked most. Nobody really liked Elsie very much because it is difficult to like a child who constantly squirms. She went, at school, by the name of “The Worm.” The young have an unconscious preference for success or the materials of success, and no one could have imagined a success being made of Elsie. She had long, greasy, dark hair which fell perfectly straight down her back, and was the colour of a wet haystack. Her eyes were small and rather weak, her chin receded, and her complexion was a pale fawn colour. She came into a room as if she were holding herself together with difficulty, and was unpleasantly conscious of having broken the Ten Commandments. If she had really broken them there would have been some sense in it; but she never broke anything except the points of her pencils. Miss Strickland did not notice her, except to tell her to sit up, or to get out of the way. It came as a shock to the whole school when it learned that Elsie had petitioned to be allowed to take music lessons from Miss Strickland, instead of from the less accomplished but much milder teacher provided for the younger girls. It was like asking to be led into a lion’s den without having evinced the slightest aptitude for being a Daniel.