"I wish we could set it straight with Miss Ormerod."
"'None so deaf as those who won't see'," misquoted Ermie. "The 'Orm' is one of those pig-headed people who get a notion into their precious noddles and need a surgical operation to get it out again. I'm afraid you'll have to live through the rest of the term as a blighted blossom. Cheerio! Miss Tatham will be back after Easter."
"Yes, and find I'm not a prefect. A nice tale she'll be told about it all, I expect. I'd write to her, but she hasn't answered my two last letters."
"Well, you see, the doctor said she wasn't to be worried about any school matters, and it would get rather stiff answering letters if everybody wrote to her, wouldn't it?"
"Right you are, O Queen! I stand rebuked."
Though her friends in the Sixth, and indeed most of the girls, might thoroughly sympathize with Lesbia, her deposition from the prefectship had an unfortunate effect upon those forms to which she acted as assistant mistress. Discipline had always been her weak point, and the children seemed to wax more unruly than ever. Whether they believed her guilty or innocent of the crime laid to her charge they realized she was degraded from office, and therefore considered she might be defied with impunity. Many were the weary tussles she had in her classes. She dared not appeal to Miss Ormerod, and was obliged to struggle along as best she could, fighting against the continual "ragging" to which she was subjected, and sometimes wishing all juniors were at the bottom of the sea.
She began to dread the hours when she must take command in IIIb. The girls there were a particularly turbulent crew, and experts in heckling their inexperienced young teacher. They particularly loved to "prove her with hard questions", and as she was not a modern Solomon she could rarely find satisfactory answers for these youthful "Queens of Sheba". It made her terribly nervous to be asked to settle startling by-problems of the lesson, especially when she guessed they were put on purpose to puzzle her. She would try desperately to evade them.
"That's nothing to do with what we're learning," she would say airily.
"But Miss Ormerod likes us to think things out," some determined conscientious objector would reply, "and, of course, we want to know exactly."
"Miss Ormerod says it's part of the lesson to ask questions," would pipe another child.