A Little Princess | Page 8

some
of her clothes. What DO you think of them?"
"I think they are perfectly ridiculous," replied Miss Minchin, sharply;
"but they will look very well at the head of the line when we take the
schoolchildren to church on Sunday. She has been provided for as if
she were a little princess."
And upstairs in the locked room Sara and Emily sat on the floor and
stared at the corner round which the cab had disappeared, while
Captain Crewe looked backward, waving and kissing his hand as if he
could not bear to stop.

2

A French Lesson
When Sara entered the schoolroom the next morning everybody looked
at her with wide, interested eyes. By that time every pupil-- from
Lavinia Herbert, who was nearly thirteen and felt quite grown up, to
Lottie Legh, who was only just four and the baby of the school-- had
heard a great deal about her. They knew very certainly that she was
Miss Minchin's show pupil and was considered a credit to the
establishment. One or two of them had even caught a glimpse of her
French maid, Mariette, who had arrived the evening before. Lavinia
had managed to pass Sara's room when the door was open, and had
seen Mariette opening a box which had arrived late from some shop.
"It was full of petticoats with lace frills on them--frills and frills," she
whispered to her friend Jessie as she bent over her geography. "I saw
her shaking them out. I heard Miss Minchin say to Miss Amelia that
her clothes were so grand that they were ridiculous for a child. My
mamma says that children should be dressed simply. She has got one of
those petticoats on now. I saw it when she sat down."
"She has silk stockings on!" whispered Jessie, bending over her
geography also. "And what little feet! I never saw such little feet."
"Oh," sniffed Lavinia, spitefully, "that is the way her slippers are made.
My mamma says that even big feet can be made to look small if you
have a clever shoemaker. I don't think she is pretty at all. Her eyes are
such a queer color."
"She isn't pretty as other pretty people are," said Jessie, stealing a
glance across the room; "but she makes you want to look at her again.
She has tremendously long eyelashes, but her eyes are almost green."
Sara was sitting quietly in her seat, waiting to be told what to do. She
had been placed near Miss Minchin's desk. She was not abashed at all
by the many pairs of eyes watching her. She was interested and looked
back quietly at the children who looked at her. She wondered what they
were thinking of, and if they liked Miss Minchin, and if they cared for
their lessons, and if any of them had a papa at all like her own. She had

had a long talk with Emily about her papa that morning.
"He is on the sea now, Emily," she had said. "We must be very great
friends to each other and tell each other things. Emily, look at me. You
have the nicest eyes I ever saw--but I wish you could speak."
She was a child full of imaginings and whimsical thoughts, and one of
her fancies was that there would be a great deal of comfort in even
pretending that Emily was alive and really heard and understood. After
Mariette had dressed her in her dark-blue schoolroom frock and tied her
hair with a dark-blue ribbon, she went to Emily, who sat in a chair of
her own, and gave her a book.
"You can read that while I am downstairs," she said; and, seeing
Mariette looking at her curiously, she spoke to her with a serious little
face.
"What I believe about dolls," she said, "is that they can do things they
will not let us know about. Perhaps, really, Emily can read and talk and
walk, but she will only do it when people are out of the room. That is
her secret. You see, if people knew that dolls could do things, they
would make them work. So, perhaps, they have promised each other to
keep it a secret. If you stay in the room, Emily will just sit there and
stare; but if you go out, she will begin to read, perhaps, or go and look
out of the window. Then if she heard either of us coming, she would
just run back and jump into her chair and pretend she had been there all
the time."
"Comme elle est drole!" Mariette said to herself, and when she went
downstairs she told the head housemaid about it. But she had already
begun to like this odd little girl who had such