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It was a source of mixed wonder and thankfulness to Miss Ransome on the succeeding day that she got off so cheaply when the discovery of the extent to which she had neglected her studies was made. The rebuke incurred was so inexplicably gentle, that though by this time Bonnybell was pretty well acquainted with the directness of her instructress's methods, she at first suspected that a trap must lie beneath it. She did not know that she had been saved by her usual means, a lie; only that in this case it was an innocent and unintentional one, the lie, namely, of the piled books at her bedside. She escaped with a more sorrowful than indignant expression of opinion from Camilla as to the slenderness of her intellect and her inability to grasp any subjects other than those appertaining to the cult of the frivolous and the trashy.
Insults to her intellect left Miss Ransome perfectly calm. She had long believed the truth of the saying that "Hard words break no bones," having been dieted upon expletives and adjectives both vigorous and varied whenever "poor Claire" was "not quite right. " Were her mind furnished as Camilla would have it, she might become a second Miss Barnacre, and all that she would know of men would be the banging of doors by them, in hastening from her presence whenever she lifted up her voice in the odious terminology of science and philosophy.