"I-I-I'll do it for you."
He got it wrong, which elicited a bursting giggle from me. Fillet turned on me like a barking dog.
"Go to your place, boy, and take your vulgar guffaws with you!"
Surprised at Fillet's taking it to heart in this way, I went, much abashed, to my seat, and tried to control my fit of giggling. But it so possessed me that finally it made a very horrible noise in my nose. Carpet Slippers raised his little head that was a hybrid between a peach and a billiard ball—a peach as to the face, and a billiard ball as to the cranium—and when he saw me sitting with lips tightly set and my desk trembling with my internal laughter, anger put a fresh coating of red upon both peach and ball. But he took no action at present.
"I-I'll d-do one of these sums on the board for you."
Getting up, he turned his back on us and, facing the board, wrote with his chalk the number 10. Now, as he wrote on a level with his eyes, his fat little head quite eclipsed his writing. So, simply to show that I was no longer laughing, I called out loudly:
"What number, sir?"
Round swung Carpet Slippers, his peach-face assuming the tint of a tomato.
"What number? I-I'll t-teach you to ask 'what number' when I've written '10' on the board. I-I've heard what you do in other class-rooms. D-don't think you're going to introduce your hooliganism here. Go and ask the p-porter to let me have a cane."
The boys pricked up their ears and looked at me. Penny let his jaw drop in amazement and, leaving his mouth open, maintained an expression like that of the village idiot. I stared, flabbergasted, into Carpet Slippers' face.