“Mademoiselle, I’m afraid you’ll be very angry, but it was I who spilt the ink and burst the back of your dictionary.  I ought to have told you at once, I know, but I never thought any girl would be such an image as to let you scold her without telling you she had not done it.”  Seeing a look of suspicion on her sunless face, I added nonchalantly, “Of course, if you think my conduct sets a bad example in your school, I can easily go!”

I observed her eyelids flicker and I said: 

“I think, before you scolded Sarah, you might have heard what she had to say.”

Mlle. De Mennecy:  “Ce que vous dites me choque profondement; il m’est difficile de croire que vous avez fait une pareille lachete, mademoiselle!”

Margot (protesting with indignation):  “Hardly lachete, Mademoiselle!  I only knew a few moments ago that you had been so amazingly unjust.  Directly I heard it, I came to you; but as I said before, I am quite prepared to leave.”

Mlle. De Mennecy (feeling her way to a change of front):  “Sarah s’est conduite si heroiquement que pour le moment je n’insiste plus.  Je vous felicite, mademoiselle, sur votre franchise; vous pouvez rejoindre vos camarades.”

The Lord had delivered her into my hands.

One afternoon, when our instructress had gone to hear Princess Christian open a bazaar, I was smoking a cigarette on the schoolroom balcony which overlooked the railway line.

It was a beautiful evening, and a wave of depression came over me.  Our prettiest pupil, Ethel Brydson, said to me: 

“Time is up!  We had better go in and do our preparation.  There would be the devil to pay if you were caught with that cigarette.”

I leant over the balcony blowing smoke into the air in a vain attempt to make rings, but, failing, kissed my hand to the sky and with a parting gesture cursed the school and expressed a vivid desire to go home and leave Gloucester Crescent for ever.

Ethel (pulling my dress):  “Good gracious, Margot!  Stop kissing your hand!  Don’t you see that man?”

I looked down and to my intense amusement saw an engine-driver leaning over the side of his tender, kissing his hand to me.  I strained over the balcony and kissed both mine back to him, after which I returned to the school-room.

Our piano was placed in the window and, the next morning, while Ethel was arranging her music preparatory to practising, it appeared my friend the engine-driver began kissing his hand to her.  It was eight o’clock and Mlle. de Mennecy was pinning on her twists in the window.

I had finished my toilette and was sitting in the reading-room, learning the passage chosen by our elocution master for the final competition in recitation.

My fingers were in my ears and I was murmuring in dramatic tones: 

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. ...”