"That is perfectly correct, Jennie," said the English teacher, grimly, when the class had come to order, "but _you_ are altogether wrong. You may show me that sentence written plainly forty times when you come to the class to-morrow."
"Zowie!" murmured Jennie in Nancy's ear as they were excused. "I bet she thought that hurt."
But the ingenious Jennie had recourse to a typewriter in one of the offices which the girls could use if they wished. She put in forty slips of tissue paper, with carbon sheets between each two, and wrote the troublesome sentence on all forty slips at once!
"You know very well this was not what I meant when I gave you the task, Jennie," commented Miss Halliday, yet having hard work not to smile.
"You particularly said to write it plainly," returned the demure Jennie. "And what could be plainer than typewriting?"
These jokes, and their like, made her beloved by a certain number of the girls, amused the others, and sometimes bothered her teachers a good deal.
But there was not a girl in all Pinewood Hall who would have been of such help to Nancy Nelson at this juncture as Jennie Bruce.
When Jennie was out of the building in recreation time, Nancy either kept close in Number 30, or crept away to some empty office and conned her lesson books industriously.
When Jennie was at hand Nancy began to see that she need fear little trouble from the Montgomery clique. They were all afraid of Jennie's sharp tongue. And after Cora had tried to be nasty to Nancy before a crowd a couple of times, and Jennie had turned the laugh against her, Nancy's enemies learned better.
But one noon Grace Montgomery received a letter which, after reading, she passed around among her particular friends. It was eagerly read, especially by Cora Rathmore.
That young lady immediately walked over to Nancy, who was sitting alone reading, and she shook the letter in the surprised girl's face.
"Now I've got you, Miss!" she fairly hissed.
Nancy looked up, startled, but could not speak.
"Now we know where you came from, and what and who you are, Nancy Nelson!" pursued Cora. "A girl like you--a nobody--a foundling--Oh! I'll see if I have got to associate with such _scum_!"
She wheeled sharply away, and had Nancy recovered her powers of speech she would have had no time to reply to this tirade.