No speech so interwoven with slang as the speech of a schoolgirl--except
that of a schoolboy.

There came a sudden hush upon the class-room after Miss Rylance had
departed on her errand. It was a sultry afternoon in late June, and the
four rows of girls seated at the two long desks in the long bare room,
with its four tall windows facing a hot blue sky, felt almost as
exhausted by the heat as if they had been placed under an air-pump. Miss
Pew had a horror of draughts, so the upper sashes were only lowered a
couple of inches, to let out the used atmosphere. There was no chance of
a gentle west wind blowing in to ruffle the loose hair upon the foreheads
of those weary students.

Thursday afternoons were devoted to the study of German. The sandy-haired
young woman at the end of the room furthest from Miss Pew's throne was
Fraeulein Wolf, from Frankfort, and it was Fraeulein Wolf's mission to go
on eternally explaining the difficulties of her native language to the
pupils at Mauleverer Manor, and to correct those interesting exercises of
Ollendorff's which ascend from the primitive simplicity of golden
candlesticks and bakers' dogs, to the loftiest themes in romantic
literature.

For five minutes there was no sound save the scratching of pens, and the
placid voice of the Fraeulein demonstrating to Miss Mullins that in an
exercise of twenty lines, ten words out of every twenty were wrong, and
then the door was opened suddenly--not at all in the manner so carefully
instilled by the teacher of deportment. It was flung back, rather, as if
with an angry hand, and a young woman, taller than the generality of her
sex, walked quickly up the room to Miss Pew's desk, and stood before that
bar of justice, with head erect, and dark flashing eyes, the incarnation