"Um! You can hardly call Catherine jolly with the kids."
"That's just it. They resent it; they've gone their own way lately, and it's been decidedly downhill. I'm persuaded they're playing some deep and surreptitious game at present. I wish I knew what it was."
"Can't Rona tell you?"
"I wouldn't pump Rona for the world. It's most frightfully difficult for her, a junior, to be room-mate with a senior. Her form always suspect her of giving them away to the Upper School. Rona's had a hard enough struggle to get any footing at all at The Woodlands, and I don't want to make it any harder for her. If she once gets the reputation of 'tell-tale' she's done for. Since Stephanie made that fuss about juniors coming into senior rooms I mayn't ask her into V b; so if she's ostracized by her own form too she'll be neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. No; however I find out it mustn't be through Rona."
"Yes, I quite see your point. Now you speak of it, I believe those juniors are up to something. There's a prodigious amount of whispering and sniggering among them. 'What's the joke?' I said to Tootie Phillips yesterday, and she flared out in the most truculent manner: 'That's our own business, thank you!'"
"Tootie has been making herself most objectionable lately. She wants sitting upon."
"Catherine will do that, never fear."
"No doubt, but it doesn't bring us any nearer finding out what those juniors are after."
"They vanish mysteriously after tea sometimes. I vote we watch them, and next time it happens we'll stalk them."
"Right-O! But not a word to anybody else, or it might get about and put them on their guard."