Noreen stared wildly around her for inspiration. "Je pense—je pense——"
"Continuez," said Mademoiselle inexorably.
"Je pense—que je n'ai pas des pensées sur le sujet—encore," poor Noreen informed her miserably.
"Fourteen years old, and without a thought on a subject so concerning the welfare of your great nation," Mademoiselle said, with slow scorn. "It is a pity almost that you have a nation, Noreen. You should belong to some miserable little German State, where la patrie is represented by the gendarme with his big fist, and the tax-collector. Find another subject that you can talk of—some of those that figure in the paper during your silly season will suit you well, I make no doubt."
Noreen, scarlet about the ears, was obviously unable to find a subject at all. Perhaps it was not wonderful! Joey, burning with resentment for her friend, rushed into the breach.
"Il serait tres"—she tried to think of the word for improving, but failing to see even a glimpse of it, unfortunately substituted "amusante, si vous voulez dire á nous l'histoire d'une chose ou deux que vous avez vue pendant la guerre de soixante-dix quand les allemands et les français...."
Mademoiselle swung round upon the daïs and looked hard at Joey, standing up in her place, rather frightened and very floundering about the French, but sturdily determined to go through with the business she had undertaken. Mademoiselle heard her out, with no comment bad or good till she reached the word "français," then suddenly her heavy black eyes gave a great flash.
"You are, I think, a new girl, and therefore scarcely know, perhaps, how great an impertinence you commit," she said very quietly, but in a voice that was more dreadful than if she had screamed. "But any girl that is worthy of the name of English should understand that to ask a Frenchwoman, who has seen and remembers, to amuse her with stories of the time when France was trodden in the dust by swine, is to make an insult that can nefare be forgotten. Leave the classroom; I will not teach such a girl. Sybil, impart to me your views on the best length for summer holidays—perhaps that will not be beyond your range of intellect."
Joey heard no more; somehow she reached the door and stumbled out, feeling so indelibly disgraced that she had serious thoughts of taking the next train home. Now she came to think about it, it was a hopeless thing that she had said; how would she have liked it if the girls had asked her, Joey, to tell them a funny story about prisoners of war in German hands. Of course they were the same Germans—at least the fathers of the horrible Huns who had tortured the wounded and prisoners, and hurt little children like Tiddles. And Joey had used that word amusante, when Mademoiselle remembered things—perhaps as bad as the things which Mums had never wished the children to read in the newspapers.