“That’s enough, Jennie!” as a giggle arose from the roomful of girls. “Your excuses are worse than your sins.”
And her thirst for knowledge! Of course, it was a desire for information that was by no possibility of any value to either herself or the class.
“Is this sentence good English, Miss Halliday?” asked Jennie, after scribbling industriously for some minutes, and then reading from her paper: “‘A girl was criticised by her teacher for the use of the word “that,” but it was proved that that “that” that that girl used was that “that” that that girl should have used.’ Is that right?”
“That is perfectly correct, Jennie,” said the English teacher, grimly, when the class had come to order, “but you are altogether wrong. You may show me that sentence written plainly forty times when you come to the class to-morrow.”
“Zowie!” murmured Jennie in Nancy’s ear as they were excused. “I bet she thought that hurt.”
But the ingenious Jennie had recourse to a typewriter in one of the offices which the girls could use if they wished. She put in forty slips of tissue paper, with carbon sheets between each two, and wrote the troublesome sentence on all forty slips at once!
“You know very well this was not what I meant when I gave you the task, Jennie,” commented Miss Halliday, yet having hard work not to smile.
“You particularly said to write it plainly,” returned the demure Jennie. “And what could be plainer than typewriting?”
These jokes, and their like, made her beloved by a certain number of the girls, amused the others, and sometimes bothered her teachers a good deal.
But there was not a girl in all Pinewood Hall who would have been of such help to Nancy Nelson at this juncture as Jennie Bruce.