"Well, I'm sure I'm not nearly as bad as you!" Flossie retorted once. "You do the most outrageous things. I never mixed the French and history exercises, nor dipped the chalk into the red ink!"
"It's worse to crib someone else's work," protested Honor, "because that's sneaky and underhand. What would Miss Farrar say if she knew you wrote dates on a slip of paper and put it inside your dictionary, and then copied them when you pretended you were only looking how to spell a word?"
"Miss Farrar won't find out, and what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve for!"
"But it's so mean!"
"You turning Mentor!" sneered Flossie. "Really! I wonder what we may expect next? Come, girls, and hear our most righteous and well-conducted Paddy preach a homily on 'How to be the pattern pupil'!"
"Paddy is quite right," declared Maisie Talbot, taking up the cudgels for once on Honor's behalf. "There's a difference between her way of breaking rules and yours. She mayn't be exactly a shining example to the class, but, at any rate, she's always square and above-board, and that's more than I can say for you!"
"We're none of us saints," added Lettice, "but we've never gone in for cribbing at Chessington. No other girl in the Form ever does it."
It was not only as regards the question of fairness in her work that Flossie failed to reach the standard of honour current in the Lower Third. She had many little meannesses, so small in themselves as to be hardly worthy of notice, yet enough in the aggregate to exhibit her character unfavourably.
One morning, just as the girls were going to their desks, Maisie Talbot suddenly remembered that it was Miss Farrar's birthday.
"We ought to say something about it," she whispered to Lettice. "I wish we had thought of it before, and bought her some flowers. How stupid we were to forget!"