"I'll do my best," she answered brightly. "I picked up a few words from the other girls last night that I didn't know before. There was 'ripping' for one, and—what was the other, now, that caught on to me? Oh, I know!—'rotten'. I won't forget it again."

Miss Poppleton's face was a study.

"Of course I don't mean slang words like those. The girls had no business to be using them. You must copy the best, and not the worst."

"I guess it will take me a while to learn the difference."

"You'll have to expunge 'guess' and 'reckon' from your vocabulary."

Gipsy heaved an eloquent sigh.

"I'll make a mental note of what I've got to avoid, but I expect they'll slip out sometimes. But about that pan, please! Might the janitor go out and buy it for me? I can't make any Fudge till I get it, and I reck—that is to say, I mean to teach those girls to make Fudge. They've not tasted it."

Miss Poppleton glared at her irrepressible pupil with a glance that would have quelled Hetty Hancock or Lennie Chapman, but Gipsy did not flinch.

"They've actually never tasted Fudge!" she repeated, with a smile of pity for their ignorance.

But Miss Poppleton's patience was at an end.