"Well, maybe it is," answered Gyp, putting her spoon in her soup with assumed indifference. "Some silly girls' society, I'll bet," put in Graham with a tormenting grin. Gyp had passed beyond the age when Graham's teasing could disturb her. She smiled to show how little she minded his words. "You'll know, my dear brother, _sometime_, whether we're silly or not," she answered with beautiful dignity. "_We're_ not a society that's organized just for _fun_!" Which was, of course, a slap at the Sphinxes. Isobel roused suddenly to an active interest in the discussion. "You're just copy-cats," she declared, with a withering scorn that brought Graham to Gyp's defence. No wonder Jerry never found a moment in the Westley home dull! "_You_ needn't think," he shot across the table at Isobel, "that 'cause you have waves in your hair you're the whole ocean!" "Funny little boy," Isobel retorted, trying hard to hold back her anger. "Mother, I should think you'd make Graham stop using his horrid slang!" "That's not slang--that's _idiotmatic_ English," added Graham, smiling mischievously at his mother. He chuckled. "You should have heard Don Blacke in geom. class to-day. He got up and said: 'Two triangles are equal if two sides and the included angle of one are equal _respectfully_ to two sides,' and when we all laughed he got sore as a cat!" CHAPTER X THE DEBATE "Gyp--_what_ do you think has happened?" Jerry frantically clutched Gyp's arm as they met outside of the study-room door. Jerry did not wait for Gyp to "think." "My name's been drawn for the debate--this Friday night! Miss Gray just told me. I'm taking Susan Martin's place." "What _fun_----" Jerry had wanted sympathy. "Not fun at all! I am scared to death." A bell rang and Gyp scampered off to her classroom, leaving Jerry to go to her desk, sit down and contemplate with a heavy heart the task that lay before her. She had never so much as spoken a "piece" in her life; since coming to Highacres she had listened, with fascination, to the weekly discussion of current topics, envying the ease with which the boys and girls of the room contributed to it. She had wondered whether she could ever grow so accustomed to large groups of people as to be able to talk before them. Now Miss Gray, waving in her face the little pink slip that had done all the damage, was driving her to the test. However, there had been a great deal in Jerry's simple childhood, spent on the trails of Kettle Mountain, that had given to her an indomitable courage for any challenge. Real fear--that horrible funk that turns the staunchest heart cowardly, Jerry had never known--what she had sometimes called fear had been only the little heartquake of expectation.