Explore "Bashful Fifteen" by L.T. Meade on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For the past week, Janet May had managed, through her tact and cleverness, to make Bridget's life quite comfortable to her. She had shown her a way in which she could obey the rules and yet not feel the fetters. She imparted to Bridget some of that strange and fatal secret which leads to death in the long run, but which at first shows many attractions to its victims. Bridget might live at the school, and have a very jolly, and even independent time; all she had to do was to obey the letter and break the spirit.
In point of acquirements, Biddy could scarcely hold a place even in the middle school. She had many talents, but her education had never been properly attended to. During the last week, however, she had made rapid progress in her studies; she had been moved up a whole class, and was steadily getting to the top of her present one. Her masters and mistresses praised her, and these words of approval proved themselves extremely sweet, and spurred her on to make genuine efforts in those studies for which she had really a talent. Biddy's English was perhaps her weakest point. Her spelling was atrocious; her writing resembled a series of hieroglyphics; her sums were faulty; her history was certainly fable, not fact.