“Well, I said that Miss Primer looked like a dying duck in a thunder-storm.”
The horrified amazement of everybody in the room expressed itself in a gasp that sounded like a ghostly, an infinitely attenuated scream of dismay. Sylvia, partly from nervousness, partly because the simile even on repetition appealed to her sense of the ridiculous, laughed aloud for a second time—laughed, indeed, with a kind of guffaw the sacrilegious echoes of which were stifled in an appalled silence.
“Sylvia Scarlett and Phyllis Markham will both leave the room immediately,” said Miss Ashley. “I will speak to them later.”
Outside the study of the head-mistress, Sylvia and Phyllis looked at each other like people who have jointly managed to break a mirror.
“What will she do?”
“Sylvia, I simply couldn’t help it. I simply couldn’t bear them all any longer.”
“My dear, I know. Oh, I think it was wonderful of you.”
Sylvia laughed heartily for the third time, and just at this moment the twins, who were the original cause of all the commotion, came sidling up to know what everybody had said.
“You little beasts with your bull’s-eye lamps and your naughtiness,” Phyllis cried. “I expect we shall all be expelled. What fun! I shall get some hunting. Oh, three cheers, I say!”
“Of course you know why Miss Primer was really in such a wax?” Gladys asked, with the eyes of an angel and the laugh of a fairy.