"You'll be standing perennially on the platform now, holding your teeth like a dentist's advertisement, to show us how to 'open ze mouz'!"
"I wish you'd revise the schoolbooks and cut out the difficult parts!"
"Go on! Rag me as much as you like. I don't care!" retorted Gipsy sturdily.
"I've brought this picture of a sausage," piped one of the smaller girls. "I'm going to pin it on to the piano. She knows we call her 'Sausage'! She'll be in such a rage!"
"You little horror!" said Gipsy, seizing the picture and tearing it into shreds before the eyes of its enraged owner.
On the whole, though her championship was treated as a joke, Gipsy's influence had a beneficial effect, and the general behaviour in the singing class began steadily to improve. Her Briarcroft songs were appreciated, and the girls sang them lustily and trolled out the chorus with vigour. The tunes were very catchy and bright, and everybody seemed constantly to be humming them, in season or out of season.
"Your 'Hurrah! for the dear old School!' has got in my brain, Yankee Doodle," said Mary Parsons. "It haunts me all day long, and I can't get rid of it."
"We'll sing it in the lecture hall on the last day of the term. Poppie'd be quite flattered," said Hetty Hancock.
"With a special cheer for Fräulein Hochmeyer, then!" added Gipsy.