Page:Angela Brazil--the leader of the lower school.djvu/79

Rh taking the matter quite seriously. "I'm going to have a new camera for my birthday, then I'll try again. But no snapshot could make Gipsy look as sweet as she really does."

"Not to your love-lorn eyes!" giggled the girls.

"Meg's a perfect joke at present," said Ethel Newton to Daisy Scatcherd. "She copies Gipsy slavishly, even to doing her hair the same, and those two big bows of ribbon don't suit her in the least, however nice they look on Gipsy."

"And yet she's rather like Gipsy, just like enough to be a kind of pale copy—an understudy, in fact."

"You've hit it! Understudy's the very word. She's absolutely forming herself on Gipsy."

Curiously enough, Meg Gordon really bore rather a marked physical resemblance to the object of her worship. She was slim, and dark, and about the same height, and though she lacked Gipsy's vivacity of expression, a stranger might quite possibly have mistaken the one girl for the other. It was perhaps just as well that Gipsy had one such devoted ally, for there were a few malcontents in the Form who were not at all ready to accept her with enthusiasm. Maude Helm had taken a dislike to her from the first, and had allowed her prejudice not only to blind her to Gipsy's good points, but to cause her to try to influence others in her disfavour. It is rarely that anybody succeeds in doing a public service without making any enemies, and Gipsy was no exception to the rule. According to Maude's code, she had violated every tradition of school etiquette by pushing herself,