“I—I—I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia, gasping.
“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.
“What do you mean by ‘Oh, Laura’?” asked Miss Jean. “Who is Laura?”
“You can search me,” replied Bud composedly. “Jim often said ‘Oh, Laura!’ when he got a start.”
“It’s not a nice thing to say,” said Miss Jean. “It’s not at all ladylike. It’s just a sort of profane language, and profane language is an ‘abomination unto the Lord.’”
“But it was so like Jim,” said Bud, giggling with recollection. “If it’s slang I’ll stop it,—at least I’ll try to stop it. I’m bound to be a well-off English undefied, you know; poppa—father fixed that.”
The school was demoralised without a doubt, for now the twins were standing nervously before Bud and put on equal terms with her in spite of themselves, and the class was openly interested and amused—more interested and amused than it had ever been at anything that had ever happened in the doo-cot before. Miss Amelia was the first to comprehend how far she and her sister had surrendered their citadel of authority to the little foreigner’s attack. “Order!” she exclaimed. “We will now take up poetry and reading.”
Bud cheered up wonderfully at the thought of poetry and reading, but, alas! her delight was short-lived, for the reading-book put into her hand was but a little further on than Auntie Ailie’s Twopenny. When her turn came to read “My sister Ella has a cat called Tabby. She is black, and has a pretty white breast. She has long whiskers and a bushy white tail,” she read with a tone of amusement that exasperated the twins, though they could not explain to themselves why. What completed Bud’s rebellion, however, was the poetry. “Meddlesome Matty” was a kind of poetry she had skipped over in Chicago, plunging straightway into the glories of the play-bills and Shakespeare, and when she had read that—
“One ugly trick has often spoiled The sweetest and the best; Matilda, though a pleasant child, One ugly trick possessed”—
“I can’t help it, Miss Duff,” she said when the twins showed their distress. “It looks like poetry, sure enough, for it’s got the jaggy edges, but it doesn’t make any zip inside me same as poetry does. It wants biff.”