“Don’t care if you don’t believe it!” said Rex, under his breath: not so low, however, but Jean caught the words. She looked at him steadily, and the small boy had the grace to redden.
“That’s impertinence,” she said. “You mustn’t think that you can speak to me like that, or that you can show me that sort of copy. Write the next one, please.” She pushed the hair from her forehead with a tired gesture. “Now, Billy—let me see yours.”
Billy was laboriously finishing, the end of a very pink tongue appearing at the corner of his mouth as he made his way along the last line. He completed the final word, and, seizing his blotting-paper, banged it down on his copy, smudging it hopelessly. The bang brought an angry growl from Rex.
“Can’t you keep from jolting? How d’you expect a fellow to write a copy?”
“Oh—Billy!” Jean said.
What could be seen of Billy’s copy showed that it was rather worse than Rex’s. It was scrawled carelessly throughout, with an easy disregard of the finer flights of penmanship provided by the copy-book maker.
“Well, I couldn’t help smudging it, could I?”
“Yes, of course you could if you’d tried,” Jean said. “But it wasn’t decently written before you smudged it. You haven’t even looked at the copy after the first line.”
“Yes, I did. What else would I look at?”
“Why, you’ve looked at your own disgraceful writing. You’ve spelt ‘glitters’ with one ‘t’ in the second line, and copied it throughout, with every other mistake. I believe you boys have just been larking while I was out of the room. I won’t trust you again.”