In the Attic
- Sara is wrecked, obviously, but Miss Minchin wants her to just get on ASAP.
- She sends away Mariette and takes all of Sara's nice stuff, and then tells her that she's going to sit with the younger children to watch over them and keep them quiet.
- So Sara pretty much becomes another little drudge at Miss Minchin's school, helping the kids with their lessons, running errands, and doing all sorts of other stuff.
- Hasn't anyone here heard of child labor laws?!
- Now that she's a maid, Sara hardly has time to speak to her friends, and a lot of the girls she used to hang out with treat her differently.
- Lavinia, of course, is delighted.
- Sara doesn't complain and works very hard, soldiering on through the trenches. (So to speak.)
- Lucky her, she's got good friends.
- At night, Sara takes comfort in the fact that Becky is on the other side of the wall, and is always there to make sure that she's okay.
- Her relationship with Ermengarde is a wee bit more complicated; at first, things are awkward because Sara assumes that Ermengarde is shunning her like the other girls.
- Then one night, Sara heads up to the attic for bed and sees that there's light coming from underneath her door—creeptastic!
- When she opens it there's Ermengarde.
- Ermengarde confronts Sara and asks her why she doesn't like her anymore—and Sara realizes that she's made a rather silly mistake. She had assumed that Ermengarde was judging and shunning her, but really she ended up shunning Ermengarde.
- The girls reconcile and Sara says that she pretends that she's a prisoner in the Bastille when she's locked up in the attic.
- Ermengarde asks if she can come up at night sometimes and hear Sara's stories. Of course!