Sometimes it seemed to Maria that if she could only have her own
mother scold her, instead of Miss Slome's talking so sweetly to her,
she would give the whole world.

For some unexplained cause, the sorrow which Maria had passed through
had seemed to stop her own emotional development. She looked at
Wollaston Lee sometimes and wondered how she had ever had dreams
about him; how she had thought she would like him to go with her,
and, perhaps, act as silly as her father did with Miss Slome. She
remembered how his voice sounded when he said she was nothing but a
girl, and a rage of shame seized her. "He needn't worry," she
thought. "I wouldn't have him, not if he was to go down on his knees
in the dust." She told Gladys Mann that she thought Wollaston Lee was
a very homely boy, and not so very smart, and Gladys told another
girl whose brother knew Wollaston Lee, and he told him. After a
little, Wollaston and Maria never spoke when they met. The girl did
not seem to see the boy; she was more delicate in her manner of
showing aversion, but the boy gazed straight at her with an insolent
stare, as at one who had dared him. He told the same boy who had told
him what Maria had said, that he thought Amy Long was the prettiest
girl in school, and Maria was homely enough to crack a looking-glass,
and that came back to Maria. Everything said in the school always
came back, by some mysterious law of gravitation.

There was one quite serious difficulty involved in Aunt Maria's
deserting her post, and that was, Maria was too young to be left
alone in the house every night while her father was visiting his
fiancee. She could not stay at Mrs. White's, because it was obviously
unfair to ask them to remain up until nearly midnight to act as her
guardian every, or nearly every, night in the week. However, Harry