She was too proud to let the hurt feeling show itself on her face, however, and propping up the newspaper beside her plate, she plunged into the latest accounts from the Front.

CHAPTER VI

A Crisis

Winona had been more than a month, nearly five weeks indeed, at the Seaton High School.  In the first few days of her introduction to V.a. she had told herself that the difficulty of the work consisted largely in its newness, and that as soon as she grew accustomed to it she would sail along as swimmingly as Garnet Emerson, or Olave Parry, or Hilda Langley, or Agatha James.  Most unfortunately she found her theory acted in the opposite direction.  Closer acquaintance with her Form subjects proved their extreme toughness.  She was not nearly up to the standard of the rest of the girls.  Her Latin grammar was shaky, her French only a trifle better, she had merely a nodding acquaintance with geometry, and had not before studied chemistry.  Her teacher seemed to expect her to understand many things of which she had hitherto never heard, and was apparently astounded at her ignorance.  Winona puzzled over her text-books during many hours of preparation, but she made little headway.  The royal road to learning, which she had fondly hoped to tread, was proving itself a stony and twisting path.

“You seem to get on all right?” she said wistfully to Garnet one day.

“Why, yes.  Of course one has to work,” admitted her friend.  “Miss Huntley keeps one up to the mark.  But one must expect that in V.a.  They don’t put scholarship holders in the Preparatory.”

“I was all at sea in math. this morning.”

“You were rather a duffer, certainly.  The problems weren’t as difficult as the ones they gave us in the entrance exam.  If those didn’t floor you, why couldn’t you work these?”

“But they did floor me.  I barely managed half the paper.  I reckoned I’d failed in it.”

Garnet looked surprised.

“Then your other subjects must have been extremely good to make up for it.  I was told that we should probably stand or fall by maths.  You were ripping in everything else, I suppose?  Scored no end?”

Winona did not answer the question.  She was conscious that none of her papers could have merited such an eulogium.  She envied Garnet’s grasp of the form work.  Try as she would, her own exercises and translations were poor affairs, and her ill-trained memory found it difficult to marshal the enormous number of facts that were daily forced upon it.  Miss Huntley at first was patient, but as the weeks wore on, and Winona still wallowed in a quagmire of amazing mistakes, she grew sarcastic.  The girl winced under some of her cutting remarks.  Apparently the mistress imagined her failure to be due to laziness and inattention, and sooner than confess that she could not understand the work, Winona was silent.  She never mentioned the long hours she spent poring over her books in Aunt Harriet’s dining-room.  After all, it was better to be thought idle than stupid.  But it was humiliating to feel that she was counted among the slackers of the Form, while Garnet was already winning laurels.  The contrast between the two scholarship holders could not fail to be noticed.