"Gibbie's certainly not given to trotting out pet names, even before parents," chirruped Morvyth Holmes. "Perhaps she's striking out a new line, and we shall all be 'Darling' and 'Sweetest' now!"
"Don't you alarm yourself! She couldn't twist her tongue round them. I'd think she was pining away to an early death if she did! You'll hear plenty of plain, straight, wholesome talking-to before you're half an hour older, my child, or else I'm entirely mistaken."
"_You_ will, old sport, unless you've mended your ways," chuckled Morvyth. "Are you a reformed character this term, may I ask? Come back with a certificate for good behaviour--no vice, gentle in harness, a child can drive her, etcetera?"
"Help! The school would die of dullness if I did! You'd be positively bored to tears. No, we all have our talents, and I consider my mission in life is to keep things humming and cheer you all up. I may do it at some personal sacrifice, but----"
"Personal thingumjig!" interrupted Valentine Gorton.
"But it is!" persisted Raymonde, her dark eyes dancing. "You don't know how disinterested I am. Gibbie can't row us all at once, and when I draw fire on myself I save you. See? I'm a kind of scapegoat for the school. Everybody's sins are stuck on to me. Gibbie lets forth the vials of her wrath, the storm's over, she feels better, and nobody else is much the worse."
"Bless you, child, I'm as used to scolding as eels to skinning. Neither the Bumble Bee nor the Wasp worry me. I let them both buzz. It seems to please them! Indeed, I think they expect it. When one's got a reputation, one's bound to live up to it."
Raymonde Armitage would certainly not have won a medal for exemplary behaviour, had any such prize been offered at the school. There was no harm in her, but her irrepressible spirits were continually at effervescing point, and in fizzing over were liable to burst into outbreaks of a nature highly scandalizing to the authorities. As regarded Miss Beasley, the Principal, though she upheld discipline firmly, it was an open secret that she had a sneaking weakness for Raymonde. "The Bumble Bee rows Ray, but she likes her," was the general verdict. With Miss Gibbs, however, it was a different matter. The humour of a situation never appealed to her. She frankly considered her troublesome pupil as a thorn in the flesh, and perhaps gave her credit for more than she really deserved in the way of blame. It was whispered in the school that several enterprising spirits had managed to shift on to Raymonde's shoulders the consequences of their own crimes, with results more satisfactory to themselves than to their lively classmate. In spite of the fact that she had passed her fifteenth birthday, Raymonde was the most irresponsible creature in the world. She looked it. Her face was as round and smooth as an infant's, with an absurd little dab of a nose, a mouth with baby dimples at the corners, and small white teeth that seemed more like first than second ones, and dark eyes which, when they did not happen to be twinkling, were capable of putting on a bewitching innocence of expression calculated to deceive almost any teacher, however experienced, save the case-hardened Miss Gibbs.