Ingrid came out, and passed Joey with a good-natured nod. A minute later there were other steps in the passage, and the temporary mathematical mistress, rather blown about from a long bicycle ride on a windy day, hurried down towards the classroom, nervously afraid of being late.
"Do you know whether Mademoiselle de Lavernais has come out yet?" she asked.
"No, she hasn't."
"Are you waiting for my class? Are you in Remove II. B by the way?" the mistress said.
Joey foresaw rocks and shoals. "I'm so new I don't know what I'm to take and what I'm not," she temporised.
"Well, come in with me and we'll see. The other girls will know," suggested the mistress. She laid a friendly hand on Joey's shoulder. Joey wriggled away, with a deplorable lack of manners, and bolted up the passage, as far as the row of little music-rooms, with their double doors. She couldn't let herself be dragged into a maths class without at least trying to make Mademoiselle see that she had not meant to be as horribly unfeeling as she had sounded.
A door opened and shut: steps—rather tired, halting steps—came towards her. Joey screwed up her courage, and made a desperate plunge in the direction of the small, black, shapeless figure advancing towards her reading a note.
"Do you mind if I say it in English, because it is frightfully hard to say what you want in French," she blurted out. "I know I was unspeakable, but I didn't mean it truly, and I couldn't think of any French word except amusante, truthfully—French is such a slippy language when you're trying to talk. I didn't mean the Franco-German business could be funny—and my Father was killed in this war!"
Mademoiselle de Lavernais had stopped reading her note when Joey began to speak, but she said nothing at all till Joey had finished. Her black eyes were fixed unwaveringly on Joey's face, so fixedly that Joey wondered vaguely through all her misery if she had an ink smudge there.