"If you're implying that I'm German—" she began. But Phyllis interrupted her.
"I'm not implying anything!" she said. "If your guilty conscience makes you imagine things—well, that's not my fault, is it? Come on, Dorothy, there's the dinner bell." And she made haste to escape from the sitting-room before Geraldine could pin her down to anything more than a vague aspersion.
"But, of course, she is German," she argued that afternoon to a select gathering of the Lower Fifth. "Everything points to it. She said she lived in Germany when she was little. I expect her mother was a German, if the truth were only known. And then her sneakiness—that's German, if you like!"
"I don't see that she is so very sneaky," protested Jack, who was still, in spite of her disappointment over the hockey team and her general acquiescence in the form's treatment of Geraldine, somewhat prepossessed in favour of the new girl, to whom she had taken an immense liking on the first evening of the term. "It really wasn't her fault that I made that caricature. And though, of course, she might have hidden the paper out of the way when she heard Miss Parrot coming, yet she was only a new girl—and perhaps she really didn't know."
"Oh, of course—if you're going to take her part——" said Phyllis in such a deprecating tone that Jack made haste to capitulate.
"I wasn't taking her part exactly. I was only pointing out that it seemed a little hard on her to be blamed for that caricature affair."
"And what about you?" demanded Phyllis. "Wasn't it hard on you to have to miss the hockey trial and still be down in B.1 when you might have been in the second eleven? You can sympathise with the new girl if you like. For my part, I think she got off very lightly. Why, most schools would have sent her to Coventry for doing a thing like that—especially when they found out that she was a German!"
"But even if she is a German—and I must say she doesn't look a bit like one; Germans are usually so big and fair and fat, and Geraldine's dark and thin—but even if she is, the war's over now, so I don't see that there's any actual harm in that," remarked Hilda Burns.
"I don't agree with you," said Phyllis darkly. "There mayn't be any harm in it, of course—I don't say that there is. But all the same it isn't nice to think that one is actually at the same school with a German girl—even though the war is over!"
"But why? They're not our enemies any longer," said Jack.