He's almost as strong as father, though he is so old.

You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don't talk stuff to me." Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her.

She rushed up to the top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden niche of the wall, shaking and crying,--now planning vengeance on her conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own ill-bred and impotent folly.
No--during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday--Marcella sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Renier, Miss Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged "the little wild-cat," as the school generally dubbed the Speaker's great-niece, whenever she could.
But with the third year fresh elements and interests had entered in.
Romance awoke, and with it certain sentimental affections.

In the first place, a taste for reading had rooted itself--reading of the adventurous and poetical kind.

There were two or three books which Marcella had absorbed in a way it now made her envious to remember.