The Carved Lions

Excerpt: ...than I actually was. Still I generally got good marks, especially for written tasks, for the teachers, though hard and strict, were not unprincipled. They did not like me, but they were fair on the whole, I think. Unluckily, however, about this time I got a bad cold. I was not seriously ill, but it hung about me for some time and made me feel very dull and stupid. I think, too, it must have made me a little deaf, though I did not know it at the time. I began to get on less well at lessons, very often making mistakes and replying at random, for which I was scolded as if I did it out of carelessness. And though I tried more and more to prepare my lessons perfectly, things grew worse and worse. At last one day they came to a point. I forget what the lesson was, and it does not matter, but every time a question came to me I answered wrongly. Once or twice I did not hear, and when I said so, Miss Broom, whose class it was, was angry, and said I was talking nonsense. It ended Pg 121 in my bursting into tears, which I had never done before in public since I had been at Green Bank. Miss Broom was very annoyed. She said a great deal to me which between my tears and my deafness I did not hear, and at last she must have ordered me to go up to my room, for her tone grew more and more angry. "Do you mean to defy me?" she said, so loud that I heard her plainly. I stared, and I do not know what would have happened if Harriet Smith, who was near me, had not started up in her good-natured way. "She doesn't hear; she's crying so," she said. "Gerry, dear, Miss Broom says you're to go up to your room." I was nothing loth. I got up from my seat and made my way more by feeling than seeing-so blinded was I by crying-to the door, and upstairs. Arrived there, I flung myself on to the end of my bed. It was cold, and outside it was raining, raining-it seems to me now that it never left off raining at Mexington that spring; the sky, if I had looked out of...