There was a grim smile on the principal's coarsely-featured countenance
as she gave this order. Miss Rylance was not one of the six who had
started up to do the schoolmistress's bidding. She was a young lady who
considered her mission in life anything rather than to carry a message--a
young lady who thought herself quite the most refined and elegant thing
at Mauleverer Manor, and so entirely superior to her surroundings as to
be absolved from the necessity of being obliging. But Miss Pew's voice,
when fortified by anger, was too much even for Miss Rylance's calm sense
of her own merits, and she rose at the lady's bidding, laid down her
ivory penholder on the neatly written exercise, and walked out of the
room quietly, with the slow and stately deportment imparted by a long
course of instruction from Madame Rigolette, the fashionable
dancing-mistress.

'Rylance won't much like being sent on a message,' whispered Miss
Cobb, the Kentish brewer's daughter, to Miss Mullins, the Northampton
carriage-builder's heiress.

'And old Pew delights in taking her down a peg,' said Miss Cobb, who was
short, plump, and ruddy, a picture of rude health and unrefined good
looks--a girl who bore 'beer' written in unmistakable characters across
her forehead, Miss Rylance had observed to her own particular circle. 'I
will say that for the old lady,' added Miss Cobb, 'she never cottons to
stuckupishness.'

Vulgarity of speech is the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She
spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she
is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye
of authority is off her, she seems naturally to degenerate into licence.