contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party
frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb
day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold
was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a
page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom,
at seven.

Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie
of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of
amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily
miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social
difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the
girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three
neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal
on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her
establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt
themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs
which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like
Marcella Boyce. Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she
was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a
famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of this great-uncle
had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed
so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the
child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish
eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired
gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called
"Grandpapa." Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory
of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.
There they were now--the glory and the dignity--a feverish leaven,
driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks,