'As for you, you wicked child,' said Miss Monflathers, turning to
Nell, 'tell your mistress that if she presumes to take the liberty
of sending to me any more, I will write to the legislative
authorities and have her put in the stocks, or compelled to do
penance in a white sheet; and you may depend upon it that you shall
certainly experience the treadmill if you dare to come here again.
Now ladies, on.'
The procession filed off, two and two, with the books and parasols,
and Miss Monflathers, calling the Baronet's daughter to walk with
her and smooth her ruffled feelings, discarded the two teachers--
who by this time had exchanged their smiles for looks of sympathy--
and left them to bring up the rear, and hate each other a little
more for being obliged to walk together.
CHAPTER 32
Mrs Jarley's wrath on first learning that she had been threatened
with the indignity of Stocks and Penance, passed all description.
The genuine and only Jarley exposed to public scorn, jeered by
children, and flouted by beadles! The delight of the Nobility and
Gentry shorn of a bonnet which a Lady Mayoress might have sighed to
wear, and arrayed in a white sheet as a spectacle of mortification
and humility! And Miss Monflathers, the audacious creature who
presumed, even in the dimmest and remotest distance of her
imagination, to conjure up the degrading picture, 'I am a'most
inclined,' said Mrs Jarley, bursting with the fulness of her anger
and the weakness of her means of revenge, 'to turn atheist when I
think of it!'
But instead of adopting this course of retaliation, Mrs Jarley, on
second thoughts, brought out the suspicious bottle, and ordering
glasses to be set forth upon her favourite drum, and sinking into
a chair behind it, called her satellites about her, and to them
several times recounted, word for word, the affronts she had
received.
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