"I always was a fool," said Alwynne, and hugged her defiantly.
But Clare, for once, made no protest. She patted her ruffled hair as she listened to the noises of the departure.
"Too fond of me?" she said softly. "Too fond of me? Alwynne--what about you?"
But if Alwynne heard, she made no answer.
Miss Marsham was accustomed to recognise that it was the brief career of Cynthia Griffiths that first induced her to consider the question of her own retirement.
It is certain that the school was never again quite as it had been before her advent. The Cynthia Griffiths term remained a school date from which to reckon as the nation reckons from the Jubilee. In an American school Cynthia Griffiths must have been at least a disturbing element--in the staid English establishment, with its curious mixture of modern pedagogy and Early Victorian training, she was seismic.
With their usual adaptability, the new girls, as they accustomed themselves subduedly to the strange atmosphere, had found nothing to cavil at in the school arrangements. They had not thought it incongruous to come from Swedish exercises to prolonged and personal daily prayers, kneeling for ten minutes at a time while their head mistress wrestled with Deity. It might have bored girls of sixteen and eighteen to learn their daily Bible verse, and recite it alternately with the Kindergarten and Lower School, but it never occurred to them to protest, any more than they were likely to object to the little note-book which each girl carried, with its printed list of twenty-five possible crimes, and the dangling pencil wherewith, at tea-time, to mark herself innocent or guilty. The hundred and one rules that Edith Marsham had found useful in the youth of her seminary, forty years before, and that time had rendered obsolete, irritating, or merely unintelligible, were nevertheless endured with entire good nature by her successions of pupils. Alwynne and her contemporaries might fume in private and Clare shrug her shoulders in languid tolerance, but nobody thought it worth while to question directly the entire sufficiency of a bygone system to the needs of the new century's hockey-playing generations.
But a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.