The Youngest Girl in the Fifth | Page 3

very ready to enter into explanations."
"But this is monstrous! It's an unheard-of thing!" exclaimed Louise Mawson excitedly. "A chit like you to be brought into the Fifth! Why, how old are you?"
"Exactly fourteen and a quarter--birthday on July 16th, if you want exact date," returned Gwen smartly.
"Oh!" "What a shame!" "We shan't stand it!" rose in such a chorus from all sides that Gwen took the opportunity to make her escape and go to the dressing-room for her lunch. The interval was only ten minutes, and she wished both to break the news to her old classmates and to fetch some necessary books from her former desk before the bell rang.
The other members of the Fifth lingered behind in perturbed consultation. They considered they had a just and most pressing grievance. In all the annals of the school such a case had never occurred before. It had been hitherto an inviolable though unwritten law that no one under the age of fifteen should be admitted to the Fifth Form, a law which they had believed as strict as that of the Medes and Persians, and here was the headmistress actually breaking it, and in favour of a girl only fourteen and a quarter. If Miss Roscoe had not brought her herself into the room they would not have credited it.
"It's abominably unfair!" broke out Rachel Hunter, a tall girl of sixteen. "Because my birthday comes on October 4th I had to stop a whole year longer in the Lower School. Yes--though my mother came and begged Miss Roscoe to let me go up!"
"Well, you couldn't get moved up on your work, at any rate, Rachel!" chirped Joan Masters. "It would have had to be favour in your case."
"That's not the point! It's a different question. If Miss Roscoe makes a rule she ought to stick to it. Why, half the girls in the Form might have come up sooner if it hadn't been for the age limit."
"You're right, and I can't see why Gwen Gascoyne should be so specially noticed."
"She's supposed to be clever, I believe."
"She doesn't look it! Besides, what do we care whether she's clever or not? It's the injustice of the thing that makes me angry. A kid like her amongst us seniors! The idea!"
"Miss Roscoe may send Gwen up," declared Louise Mawson, "but she can't make us accept her as one of ourselves. I vote we send her to Coventry."
"We will! She's nothing but a Lower School girl, and we won't tolerate her being imposed upon us!"
"She'll be so conceited at finding herself a Senior!"
"We'll soon take her pride down, then!"
"She'll meet with a few snubs here, I'll undertake to say!"
"If Miss Roscoe is going to bring up all the rank and file like that there's no credit in being in the Fifth!"
"It's a positive insult to the rest of us!"
So decided Gwen's new classmates, jealous for the prestige of their Form, and annoyed at the indignity which they considered they were made to suffer in admitting a younger girl among their number. To Gwen or her feelings they gave not a thought. If she met with an unpleasant experience all the better; it might deter Miss Roscoe from repeating the experiment. That the remove was not Gwen's fault, and therefore that it was scarcely fair to visit the headmistress's act upon her innocent head, did not enter into their calculations. Where they consider their rights are concerned schoolgirls rarely hold mercy before justice.
Meantime Gwen, who had gone to break the important tidings to the Upper Fourth, did not find her old friends as responsive as she had expected. They received her communication with marked coldness.
"Why should you have been moved up, Gwen Gascoyne, and not Daisy, or Aileen, or I?" enquired Alma Richardson, with a distinctly aggrieved note in her voice.
"Miss Roscoe always favoured Gwen!" said Eve Dawkins enviously.
"You're six months younger than Viola Sutton, so it seems absurd you should be put above her."
"You'll be so grand now, I suppose you won't care to know us!"
"It's not fair to the rest of the Form!"
"Oh dear! I'm between two fires," thought Gwen, as she hastily cleared her possessions from her old desk. "The Fifth don't want me, and the Fourth are horribly jealous. You're going to have a bad time, Gwen Gascoyne, I'm afraid! I see breakers ahead! Never mind. It's a great honour to be moved up, and Father'll be glad and sympathize, if nobody else does. The work will be pretty stiff: I expect it'll be all I can do to manage it. But I mean to have a jolly good try. I'll show those girls I can do something, though I am the youngest! Oh, I say! I've only just remembered that Winnie'll be the under-mistress. I'll have to call her 'Miss