.

Her deportment marks were dreadfully low; but she was quick at her
studies and was really too kind-hearted to _mean_ to bother the
teachers.

She managed to get in and out of a dozen scrapes a day. Yet the
rollicking good-nature of the girl, and her frank honesty did much to
save her from serious punishment.

Jennie went on her care-free way, assured in her own mind that certain
of the rules of Pinewood Hall were only made to be broken. If a thought
came to her in class, or a desire to communicate with another scholar,
she could no more resist the temptation than she could fly.

"Miss Bruce! half an hour this afternoon on grammar rules for talking!"

"Oh, Miss Maybrick! I'm so sorry. I didn't think."

"Learn to think, then."

"Jennie, if you _must_ make such faces, please do so out of the view of
your classmates, I beg." This from gentle Miss Meader.

"I--I was just trying how it felt to be strangled with a cord. It says
here the _Thuggee_ did it in India as a religious practice."

"That's enough, Jennie!" as a giggle arose from the roomful of girls.
"Your excuses are worse than your sins."

And her thirst for knowledge! Of course, it was a desire for information
that was by no possibility of any value to either herself or the class.

"Is this sentence good English, Miss Halliday?" asked Jennie, after
scribbling industriously for some minutes, and then reading from her
paper: "'A girl was criticised by her teacher for the use of the word
"that," but it was proved that that "that" that that girl used was that
"that" that that girl should have used.' Is that right?"

"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?"