17 Jo and Deirdre
The girls laughed and laughed. “It was that little monkey of a Nora,” said Alicia, again. “I saw the magnet in her hand. The cheek of it—a second-former coming right up into our room.”
“Terribly funny though,” said Clarissa, wiping her tears away. “I haven’t laughed so much for terms. I wish Nora would do it again, with me looking!”
“Poor Mam’zelle—she was absolutely bewildered,” said Mary-Lou.
“Ah ?a—c’est très piggy-hoo-leeeearr,” said Suzanne, enjoying the joke thoroughly¹. “Vairy, vairy, piggy-hoo-leeearrrrr. Most scrumpleeeeecious!”
Mam’zelle had shot into the little workroom she shared with Miss Potts, the first-form mistress. Miss Potts was mildly surprised to see Mam’zelle appear so suddenly with her hair down her back—not more than mildly though, because in her years with Mam’zelle Miss Potts had become used to various “piggy-hoo-lee-eearrr” behaviour at times from Mam’zelle.
“Miss Potts! All my pins have went!” said Mam’zelle, her grammar going too.
“Pins? What pins?” said Miss Potts. “You don’t mean your hair-pins, do you? How could they go?”
“That I do not know,” said Mam’zelle, staring at Miss Potts with such tragic² eyes that Miss Potts wanted to laugh. “One moment my bun, he is there on top—the next he is all undone³. And when I look for his pins, they are gone.”
This sounded like a trick to Miss Potts, and she said so.
“No, no, Miss Potts,” asserted Mam’zelle. “Not one girl left her place to come to me this afternoon, not one.”
“Oh well,” said Miss Potts, dismissing the matter as one of the many unaccountable things that so often seemed to happen to Mam’zelle. “I expect you didn’t put enough pins in, so your bun just came down.”
Mam’zelle found some pins and pinned her bun up so firmly that it really looked very peculiar⁴. But she wasn’t taking any risks this time! She went back to the classroom, with her dignity restored.
Nora recounted what she had done, when she got back to the second-formers. They laughed. “I bet the sixth got a laugh when Mam’zelle’s bun

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