She’d been horrible. Incorrigible, careless, bratty.
The easy thing to do would just be to punish her, to smack that stockinged ass until she wailed and apologized. But the effects of that sort of correction were fast becoming short-lived. ‘Sorry’ didn’t seem to extend beyond the moment of forgiveness. She made the same comments, the same coy quips, the same little acts of insubordination intentionally designed to provoke.
And so the best thing to do is to leave her that way. To make her wait, to forbid her from easing the angles of her back and knees, to let her cry and learn to become patient when suddenly things are no longer about her. A surefire way to reform a brat is to deny her attention to the point that contact becomes so rare and cherished that she will not do anything to provoke further action. Waiting has a profound and sobering effect on perspective.