“Once, that would have crushed me, Mademoiselle. I never thought to live to see the day when I shouldn’t be afraid of you.”
“You haven’t lived to see it yet, sir,” Louise Markham told him, saucily. “Not one of us ever will. I’ve been trembling all the evening for fear she’d say something about my laugh.”
“Dearie, am I so ferocious?” Mademoiselle reproached her with a soft, upward glance.
“Oh, I know exactly how you feel, Louise!” Jacquette cried, with a roguish nod. “Haven’t you noticed the way I tip-toe around? That’s all owing to something Mademoiselle did, the first week I was at Marston. I happened to come into the study-room and walk across the floor after everyone was seated, and she just shook her head at me and said, very solemnly, as if she were talking to herself, ‘And she so fair—so blonde!’ Then she went to the blackboard and wrote, ‘The light girl with the heavy tread—alas!’”
Everybody laughed except Bobs. He was glancing down at Jacquette’s white slippers and whispering, “As if Cinderella ever had a heavy tread!”
“That venomous little old French lady!” Mademoiselle murmured, shaking her head.
“Oh, I deserved it!” Jacquette went on gaily, answering Bobs, but looking at Mademoiselle. “That was mild, though, compared with what you said to Flo the time she complained in class that her mother made her do too much housework and didn’t leave her time to study her French. Do you remember, Flo?”
“Do I!” said Flo expressively.
“Tell us, Flo,” Bud Banister put in, grinning in advance.
“Oh, she just looked me over, calmly, and then said in her sweetest tone, ‘Throw her in the lake, honey—throw her in the lake! That’s what mothers are for—to throw in the lake!’”