The Story of Louie

In an old number of Punch, under the heading "Society's New Pet: The Artist's Model," is to be found a drawing by Du Maurier, of which the descriptive text runs:

"And how did you and Mr. Sopley come to quarrel, dear Miss Dragon?"

"Well, your Grace, it was like this: I was sitting to him in a cestus for 'The Judgment of Paris,' when someone called as wished to see him most particular; so he said: 'Don't move, Miss Dragon, or you'll disturb the cestus.' 'Very good, sir,' I said, and off he went; and when he come back in an hour and a 'alf or so he said: 'You've moved, Miss Dragon!' 'I 'aven't!' I said. 'You 'ave!' he said. 'I 'aven't!' I said-and no more I 'adn't, your Grace. And with that I off with his cestus an' wished him good-morning, an' I never been near him since!"

Du Maurier may or may not have been wrong about the newness of this craze of "Society's." If he was right, the Honourable Emily Scarisbrick becomes at once a pioneer. Let there be set down, here in the beginning, the plain facts of how, a good ten years before the indignant Miss Dragon "offed with" Mr. Sopley's cestus, the Honourable Emily found a way to bridge the gulf that lies between Bohemia and Mayfair.

Except in the case of one person not yet born into these pages, the report that the lady had engaged herself, early in the year 1869, to "Mr. Buckley, her drawing-master," had only a short currency. It was probably devised by the Honourable Emily herself in order to soften the blow for her brother, Lord Moone. The real name of the man to whom she engaged herself was James Buckley Causton. Under this name he appears on the rolls of the 4th Dragoon Guards as a trooper in the years 1862-1867; and as "Buck" Causton he attained some celebrity when, in the last-named year, he vanquished one Piker Betteridge in the prize ring, in a battle which, beginning with gloves and ending with bare knuckles, lasted for nearly nine hours.

For all we know, it may have been Miss Dragon's Mr. Sopley who, seeing the magnificent Buck in the ring, first put it into the ex-trooper's head to become an artists' model. However it was, an artists' model he did become, and, as such, the rage. No doubt Sopley, if it were he, would gladly have kept his discovery to himself; but a neck like a sycamore and a thorax capable of containing nine-hours-contest lungs cannot be hid when Academy time comes round. Sopley's measure was known. If Sopley painted an heroic picture it was certain he had had a hero as model. The Academy opens in May; before June was out Sopley's find was no longer his own. Sir Frederick Henson, the artist who moved so in the world that in him the tradition of the monarch who picked up the painter's brush for him might almost have been said to live again, saw Buck, marked Buck down as his own, and presently had sole possession of Buck.

The Honourable Emily Scarisbrick already had possession of Sir Frederick. To be sure, it neither needed a Sir Frederick Henson to teach her the stippling of birds' eggs and the copying of castles for the albums of her friends, nor was the great Academician accustomed to stooping to the office of salaried drawing-master; but-the Honourable Emily was a Scarisbrick, of Mallard Bois.

In Henson's studio the Honourable Emily first saw Buck Causton.

To say that she fell in love with him would demand a definition of the term. Certainly she fell in something with him. Perhaps that something was the something that at the last thrusts baronies and Mallard Boises aside as hindrances to a design even larger than that in which they play so important a part; but we have nothing to do with large designs here. Call it what you will: something proper enough to legend, but of little enough propriety in a modern lady's life; a feeble echo of Romance, perhaps, but never itself to become Romance unless, of it or present scandal, it should prove the stronger. At any rate, it was a very different thing from anything she felt, or ever had felt, for Captain Cecil Chaffinger, of the White Hussars, her brother's nominee for her hand.

It was a word dropped by the gallant Captain, himself a follower of the fancy, that led her to the discovery that the hero of some feat or other of extraordinary skill and endurance, and the young Ajax, all chest and grey eyes and brown curls, who did odd jobs about the studio in the intervals of posing for Henson's demigodlike canvases, were one and the same person. Her already throbbing pulse bounded. She herself was twenty-eight, a small, dark, febrile woman, given over to discontents based on nothing save on an irremediably spoiled childhood, and perhaps hankering after an indiscretion in the conviction that indiscretions were of two kinds-indiscretions, and the indiscretions of the Scarisbricks. Naturally she became conscious of a quickened interest in her art.

The first indication that this interest passed beyond birds eggs and castles was that she began "Lessons in Drapery." If here for a few moments her story becomes a little technical, it may be none the less interesting on that account.

The study of Drapery as Drapery has not much interest for anybody unless perhaps for a student of mechanics. For all that, it is, or then was, regarded by drawing-masters as a self-contained subject, to be tackled, ticked off, and thenceforward possessed. To the study of Drapery in this unrelated sense the Honourable Emily apparently inclined. Seeing her therefore, in this fundamental error, Sir Frederick, a master of Drapery, took from her the "copies" which had already supplanted the "copies" of castles in her portfolio, and good-humouredly began to tell her what she really wanted. What she really wanted, he said, was to rid her mind of the idea that folds existed for their own sake, and to endeavour to realise that their real significance lay in the thing enfolded. Miss Scarisbrick thanked him.

So, at first from the lay figure, and then from Henson's model, she began to draw Drapery with special reference to the thing draped.

About this time she gave Captain Chaffinger for an answer a "No" which he refused to take. His devotion, he said, forbade him. If by his devotion he meant his devotion to his creditors, his constancy remained at their service. In the meantime he was still able to pay his old debts by contracting new ones.

The Honourable Emily's studies became diligent.

There is little to be said about these things except that they do happen. A word now about Buck's attitude.

Had the Honourable Emily's maid thrown herself at his head he would have known what to do. His sense of the holiness of social degrees would have received no shock. But the Honourable Emily, who could command her maid, could not command what in all probability her maid would not have had to ask twice for. The most she got (when after much that is omitted here, it did at last dawn on the bashful Buck that she had any will in the matter at all) was a blush so sudden and violent that it compelled an embarrassed reddening of her own cheeks also. Buck was not personally outraged. It was his sense of Order that was outraged. He remembered the lady's station for her, and, stammeringly but reverentially, put her back into it.

Now to be merely reverential to a woman who is in love with you is to provoke impatience, anger and tears. On the other hand, to see a woman in tears because you will not permit her to humiliate herself is to have the other half of an impossible situation. It was one luncheon-time (the Honourable Emily now lunched frequently at the studio) that the tears came.

"Oh, you don't care for me-you don't care for me!" she sobbed.

Buck could not truthfully have said that he did care for her; but there she was before him, in tears.

"If it were that Dragon girl, now--"

Buck, while not failing to see the force of this, could only make imploring movements for the Honourable Emily to calm herself. Presently she did calm herself, sufficiently to change her tone to one of irony.

"Do you read your Bible?" she shot over her shoulder.

"Yes, miss," said Buck-"that is-I mean--"

The reason for Buck's hesitation was that he had suddenly doubted whether the Honourable Emily would know a Racing Calendar by the name she had just used.

"Do you mean The Bible, miss?" he said, fidgeting.

She snapped: "Yes-the one with the story of Joseph in it--"

She burst into tears anew.

"Oh, that I should have to beg a man to marry me! I hate myself-I hate you!"

Her hatred, however, did not prevent repetitions of the scene. At the last repetition that need trouble us here her tears conquered. The helpless Buck comforted her after the only fashion he knew anything about-the fashion he would have used towards her maid-on his knee.

He still, however, called her "Miss."

They were privately married in the June of 1869.

"Don't call me 'Miss'!" she broke out petulantly one day in the middle of the honeymoon. "And you are not to have your meals with the servants! I shall lunch in my room to-day, and you are to be ready to take me out at three o'clock."

"Yes, m'm," said Buck.

Probably Lord Moone had less to do than he supposed with the separation that took place in the September of the same year. We may assume that a much more potent factor was the Honourable Mrs. Causton's remembrance of her own words, "That I should have to beg a man to marry me! I hate myself-I hate you!" She did very soon hate both herself and him. Poor Buck merely hated the whole subversive anomaly.

He accepted the proposal that they should separate with perfect docility. It seemed to him entirely right. Indeed the only thing he had not accepted with docility had been his introduction to Lord Moone, on the only occasion on which the two men ever met, as "Mr. Buckley, the drawing-master." Buck hadn't liked that much. He had made himself Buck Causton in nine hours of terrific combat, and as Buck Causton he preferred to be known. But all else he suffered with touching obedience, and at the proposal that they should go their several ways his finger flew to his forehead.

"Yes, miss," he said; and his heart, if not his lips, murmured the prayer that begins: "God bless the Squire and his relations--"

They parted.

They only met once more. This was in the January of the following year, in the great antlered hall at Mallard Bois, that was as regularly used on all occasions as if there had not been salons and galleries and drawing-rooms in a dozen other parts of the great place. The Honourable Mrs. Causton lay on a couch drawn up to the fire-dogs; her husband looked submissively down on her, dwarfing the suit of armour of Big Hugo by which he stood.

She made a new proposal. It was that he should put it into her hands to set herself free once for all.

"Yes, miss," said Buck.

"Then," said the Honourable Mrs. Causton a quarter of an hour later, "there's the question of cruelty."

Buck's thoughts wandered slowly back to the Piker.

"Yes, miss," he said.

"I need hardly tell you that as far as-er-procedure-can be stretched it will be stretched."

"Yes, miss. Thank you, miss."

Then wistfully Buck's eyes wandered from Big Hugo's suit of armour to his wife's face again.

"Beg your pardon, about that cruelty, miss," he said unhappily. "Couldn't I go down-just for once, Miss-as Mr. Buckley?"

"No; but I can assure you that I don't want this talked about more than must be either. Perhaps I ought to tell you that I shall probably marry again."

Buck's finger went to his forehead again, this time in a duty to his successor. Then his eyes grew grave. His wife had made a slight movement.

"If I might make so bold, miss-there's another thing--"

She knew what he meant.

"You've nothing to do with that," she said quickly.

Buck would have thought that he had, but if a lady said he hadn't, well, he hadn't, that was all.

"Yes, miss.... And asking your pardon again-about that cruelty?"

"Oh, that's over," said Mrs. Causton, closing her eyes. "Six months ago."

"I-I don't remember," said Buck; but once more, if a lady said it was so, so it was. Again the grave look came into his eyes, and again she understood.

"I can have it looked after better than you can," she said.

"And-please-you will?" he dared to supplicate.

She nodded.

Still he hesitated.

"If it's a little boy, miss-I might be opening a Sparring Academy-strictly for the gentry-I wouldn't charge him nothing--"

And after a little further discussion the shameful piece of collusion came to an end.

They were divorced in the March of 1870. On the 15th of April the child was born-a girl. Fifteen months later the Honourable Emily married Captain Cecil Chaffinger, of the White Hussars.

The Horticultural College at Rainham Parva, now defunct, was hardly a college in the modern sense at all. Its technical books were antiquated; it had only one or two old microscopes; and it totally lacked the newer trimmings of specialisation. Its founder, a Bristol seedsman called Chesson, had bought the place cheaply, house and all, a dozen years before, and having five hardy daughters eating their heads off at home, had, as the saying is, economically emancipated them.

That meant then (whatever it may mean now) that, realising that the wages of two men and a boy might be saved, he had had them down to Rainham Parva and had set them to work.

The second Miss Chesson, Miss Harriet, had shown a real aptitude for the work. She had won, after three years, a Diploma, and this Diploma, together with the presence in the house as paying boarder of a niece of Chesson's, had put an idea into the seedsman's head-the premium idea. With the Diploma properly advertised, its grantee made Principal, a premium or so forgone (called a Scholarship) and the proper person installed over all as Lady-in-Charge, Chesson had foreseen a good deal of his work being done by young women who would pay for the privilege of being allowed to do it. There is no need to describe the development of the idea. The enterprise had prospered, and when Louie Causton had put her name down on the books and paid her fees the complement of thirty girls was full.

She did not, after all, travel down alone. Her stepfather, hinting that it was not necessary to say anything about this to her mother, made the journey with her. The pair of them shortened the hours by guessing which of the young women in the same train were to be Louie's fellow-students; and when they alighted at Rainham Magna station the Captain put Louie and her traps into one of the nondescript vehicles that only saw the light when the Rainham girls arrived or departed, and drove off with her to the college. There he shook hands with the Lady-in-Charge, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, and asked her whether she was related to Lovenant-Smith of the 24th. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's reply did not actually affirm her regret that she was so related, but the Captain's affability dried up suddenly. He was returning to town by the four-o'clock train; before doing so he took a turn round the place with Louie.

"Well," he said, as Louie took her leave of him at the gates, "it's a good growing country, I should say; rum idea of yours though.... You've heard me speak of Lovenant-Smith, haven't you? Adjutant eight or nine years ago; not a bad chap at all, I should have said. She'll be one of the Shropshire lot, I expect. I knew he had people down there.... Well, mind you don't run away with a gardener. 'Bye, Mops--"

And he was off, tugging at his moustache and inwardly commenting that the whole escapade was "just like Louie."

It was a good growing country. Chesson said that the mildness of the winters was due to the Gulf Stream; Miss Harriet Chesson attributed it to ozone-ozone having been a word to conjure with at the time when she had taken her Diploma. Ozone or Gulf Stream, it provided wild violets in December, lemon-verbena that grew in trees up the sides of the cottages and had to be cut away from the upper windows, and filled the deep lanes with the hart's-tongue fern. It also brought forth rich produce. The dairy business and poultry farm flourished; crates and parcels and returned empties kept the goods clerk at Rainham Magna station busy; and, when the heather bloomed on the hill that rose between Chesson's and the sea, the "Rainham Heather Honey," green as bronze and thick as glue, was at a premium. At the crest of the hill the seedsman's estate ended. Beyond that, dropping abruptly to the west, lay deep wooded coombes, green to the very rocks of the shore.

Louie's age put her at once out of the class of the "new girl" who, in the school tales, sits pathetically on her box and waits for somebody to speak to her. She was twenty-four, and probably only one other student, the copper-haired girl with the long thin neck and the "salt-cellars" showing through her white flannel blouse, who asked her her number and offered to show her the way to her cubicle, was more than twenty-two. Her large black feathered hat (see the first part of the Captain's advice as to how she would make the most of herself), and her expensively simple navy blue coat and skirt down to her toes, further distinguished her among the tweed jackets and ankle-length skirts of the younger girls. No doubt she had her perfect management of these and her numerous other garments from her mother's former interest in the study of Drapery. If the Captain did not think her face pretty, it must be remembered that the Captain had standards of prettiness of his own. Pretty in the professional-beauty sense her irregular mouth and long chin perhaps were not. Her large, clear, pebble-grey eyes at any rate were arresting.

The copper-haired girl, having shown Louie her cubicle, offered to show her the rest of the house also. They began upstairs on the first floor, where the girls slept. The place was an old mansion in the form of a hollow square, and as they came to each latticed embrasure Louie stopped to look at the famous Rainham yew that almost filled the grassgrown inner courtyard. The corridors were dark, and sudden steps where no steps were to have been expected made of the uneven floors a series of booby-traps for those not familiar with them. Memories of the Monmouth Rebellion seemed to linger round the corners and to be shut up in the cupboards of the place. They passed downstairs. Through the doorway of the handsome Restoration fa?ade they saw the yew again, dark beyond the shining flags of the hall. Louie had already been in the reception-room and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's private apartments on the right of the doorway; on the left, she was told, were the quarters of Miss Harriet (who alone of Chesson's daughters remained there) and the staff. The domestics slept at the top of the house; the four male gardeners (all married) occupied the farm a furlong away at the back.

"But wouldn't you like some tea?" said the copper-haired girl. "It's in the dining-room."

"I was told to report myself to Miss Chesson at five," said Louie, looking at her watch.

"Well, you've just time, if you're quick--"

They sought the room where the housekeeper ran cups of tea from the tap of a large and funereal bronze urn.

It was ten minutes to five when Louie entered the dining-room. Before the clock had struck five she had taken a certain position in the college.

She herself hardly knew how it happened. The room was full of noise and chatter, and near Louie, talking louder and making more noise than anybody else, was a lanky child of sixteen, to be a tall blonde beauty in another three or four years' time, but so far only a mass of unadjusted proportions and movements that lacked co-ordination. She had several distinct voices, and in one of these she was now engaged in unabashed mimicry. Louie, who had got her cup of tea, heard a bell-like "Os-trich feathers!" and she was about to put a question to the copper-haired girl when, with a mock reverence and an explosive "Your Ma-jesty!" the child swept backwards into her. She barely saved her cup of tea. The girl gave a quick turn; her Clum-" was changed to a "Sorry!" as she saw a new face, and Louie smiled.

"Your feet were all wrong," Louie said.

The blonde child turned eagerly again.

"Can you do it?" she asked.

The next moment, before Louie could get out "A drawing-room curtsy? Yes," the child had cried: "Girls! Girls! Here's somebody who knows how to do it! Do come and show us!"

"Really?" said Louie, smiling, and handing her cup of tea to the copper-haired girl.

"Yes-come here, Rhoda, and watch (that's my sister-she's to be presented, you know)."

Louie laughed. "Quickly then-I have to see Miss Chesson--"

And, pushed unceremoniously forward, and still in her feathered hat and navy blue costume, Louie made her first bow to her fellow-students at Chesson's in the deep and swanlike genuflexion she had practised with her cousin, Cynthia Scarisbrick, a couple of years before. Then she ran out, smiling.

"How ripping!" she heard somebody say as she did so. "I expect she's been presented."

Louie sought Miss Harriet.

The Principal, a businesslike, damson-complexioned woman of forty-five, with a deerstalker hat on her close-cropped curly hair, asked her what course of study she proposed to take. Louie replied (in other words) that all courses were the same to her. Miss Harriet had had that kind of student before. She asked a few further questions, and then put Louie down for the elementary course. She dismissed her with a marked syllabus and a copy of the Rules.

Louie read the Rules, nodded, as much as to say, "I thought so!" and then laughed. There was no need to ask who had drawn them up; she remembered the frigid way in which Chaff had been put into his place that afternoon. There was a serenity about them that transcended the ordinary imperative mood. "Students do not absent themselves from Morning Prayers or Divine Service without Permission." "Students do not give Orders to the Gardeners or Domestics." "Students do not pass beyond the Bounds of the College (Map appended)." If on occasion students did all of these things, that did not detract from the largior ether in which the Rules were conceived.

Nor did mere evidence to the contrary ever in the least degree abate Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's persuasion that the young ladies of Chesson's, being the daughters of gentlefolk, were by that very fact almost to be trusted to do without Rules at all.

On the following morning Louie, with leggings of doe-skin buttoned to her knees (see the second of the Captain's recommendations for the attire that suited her best), and wearing a wide-pocketed jacket not unlike a man's, began the practical study of Horticulture.

She was attached to the "posse" of six girls of which the copper-haired student, whose name was Richenda Earle, was the head. This girl, as the holder of the scholarship mentioned a page or two back, was the single non-fee-paying student in the place. Her father was a bookseller in Westbourne Grove, and she had kept his books for him before coming to Chesson's. She had picked up her knowledge of book-keeping at an obscure and ill-appointed Business School in Holborn, but, her health being anything but robust, she had taken up gardening under the impression that it was an out-of-doors pursuit.

It was only this at Chesson's to a strictly limited extent. Whatever students did or did not learn, the output for the market had to be maintained, and this necessitated, for days and days together, work in the twelve long glass-houses, from the humid heat of which the girls came out limp and listless and relaxed. Richenda Earle suffered from these depressions more than most of them, and now only remained at the college because Miss Harriet had held out hopes for her of a place on the staff. She was easily head of all the classes of which she was a member, but was hopelessly incapable of making her personality felt. Add to all this that she was avid of popularity, and that her self-consciousness took the form of making her more assertive (without being a bit more effective) than any girl in the college, and you will see why Louie felt a little sorry for her without taking to her very much. She for her part had fastened herself on Louie from the start, and had been the first to put the question that Louie had had to answer a dozen times before she had been at Chesson's two hours.

"No, I haven't been presented," Louie had said, finding herself waylaid almost at the door of Miss Harriet's room as she had come out again. "My cousin has; that's where I learned it. We practised it together."

"I've seen them go in," Richenda had murmured, a little wistfully, a little dully; "the carriages and things, you know. I live in London."

Thereupon she had volunteered some of the information stated above, as if inviting a confidence in return. "I'm glad you're in my posse," she had concluded, as Louie had turned away without giving any information whatever about herself.

The remaining members of "Earle's posse" were the two Burnett sisters ("B Major," the girl who was to be presented, and "B Minor," the sixteen-year-old beauty-to-be), a Scotch girl called Macfarlane, and one other girl, half French, Beatrice Pigou. There were four other posses at the college, and each was told off each day to put itself under the direction of one or other of the four gardeners, to pot, "prick out," water or whatever the task might be. The gardener at present in charge of Louie's posse was a sullen young Apollo called Priddy, whose face and neck and forearms ozone or the Gulf Stream had turned to the hue of some deep and old and mellow violin; and Burnett Minor and the younger girls, talking in terms of the life to which their eyes were yet sealed, discussed Priddy with a freedom perfectly innocent and entirely appalling.

Louie had not been at Rainham Parva two days before she was wondering whether after all she wanted to stay. She didn't know really why she had come. Not one of the three commonest reasons for girls being there-a stepmother, to be able to earn a little pocket-money, or to get over a youthful love-affair-quite fitted her case. And then there were those ridiculous Rules. She supposed that if she stayed she would be on the same footing as the juniors, and she hardly thought she could submit to that. Not that the Rules did not seem to justify themselves; on the contrary, they did. Merely because Mrs. Lovenant-Smith affirmed that students did not do this or that, students as a matter of fact either did not do these things, or else consented to class themselves as transgressors when they did.

But Louie's own attitude in the face of a prohibited thing, inherited from her mother and now made inveterate by her upbringing, was invariably that of a wonder what would happen were the prohibition to be disregarded.

It was just a wonder, nothing more.

Then, on the night of her third day at Chesson's, she made up her mind to forfeit her fees and leave in the morning. The reason for her decision was this:

During the vacation certain digging had been allowed by the gardeners to fall into arrears; and Earle's posse, together with another set of six girls, had been set to do it. Now digging was the hardest work the girls were ever called upon to do, and at the beginning of the term at any rate they were spared it as much as possible. But education or output required that this digging should be done, and accordingly the twelve girls had digged for the whole morning, and in the afternoon had varied the labour by carrying heavy pots from House No. 6 to House No. 10-a distance of perhaps sixty yards. The next morning twelve girls (or rather eleven, for Burnett Minor's unset muscles had suffered but little) were half incapacitated by stiffness, and that night there was an outcry for hot baths and arnica. Louie, clad in dressing-gown and slippers and carrying her soap and sponge and towel, hobbled to the bathrooms, and came, in the box-room, upon an indignation-meeting.

This box-room was the common meeting-ground for students who awaited their turns at the baths. It lay over the back courtyard arch, and the four bathrooms adjoined it, two on either side. It was piled almost to the ceiling with trunks and boxes and dress-baskets, the white initials of which glimmered in the shadows cast by a couple of candles on the floor; but there were isolated boxes enough to make seats for the seven or eight girls already assembled there. They had slippers on their naked feet and single garments on their aching bodies; and on one of Louie's own boxes Burnett Major was peering at the little blue flame of a spirit-kettle and mixing in a row of cups the paste for that beverage of revolt-cocoa. Burnett Minor had traitorously turned the general righteous anger to private account, had "bagged" the hottest bath, and was now carolling at the top of her lungs in the right-hand bathroom.

"--then if Earle won't do it I vote we draw lots!" Macfarlane was exclaiming shrilly as Louie opened the door. "Those lazy louts of gardeners are supposed to have all the digging done before we come up--"

They were not-not if Chesson knew it; but "Of course they are!" cried five voices at once.

"Well, I'm just not going to stand it-there--"

"And I'm not--"

"Nor me--"

"And for two pins I'd tell Priddy so!"

There was a moment's silence, but only because, all having spoken at once, all had to take breath at once.

"It's abominable--"

"Disgusting--"

"Celà m'embête--"

"Here's Causton-what do you vote, Causton?" they cried, turning to her.

"What about?" Louie asked.

"Why, everything, of course-this beastly place-and setting us to dig the first week-and Priddy's beastly cheek--"

Then every tongue was unloosed.

"And a row every time we want an extra blouse washed--"

"And washing two guineas a term extra--"

"And only the vuggles for dinner that aren't good enough for the market--" ("Vuggles" were vegetables.)

Another pause for breath.

"Let's what-d'-you-call-it-strike--"

Louie laughed as she sat stiffly down by Burnett Major.

"Oh, I'll vote for anything you like; I don't care," she said.

Then they began anew.

"Earle's head of the posse-she ought to do it--"

Richenda Earle's voice broke in in loud complaint.

"How can I? You know I would like a shot if it wasn't for my scholarship. But I should just be told that if I didn't like it I could go. Elwell's head of your lot. Elwell ought to go."

"I don't care who goes, but I will not be told to do things by Priddy."

"Priddy!--"

(Louie smiled again as there came from the bathroom the joyful voice:

"Early one mo-o-orning-as the su-un was a-rising!--")

"And those pots hadn't got to be moved-he was only making work--"

"-gros tyran!--"

"-like they kept us three weeks grading and packing tomatoes last autumn, and called it 'study'--"

"-and the bruised ones for us--"

"-not even fit for ketchup--"

"-Dothegirls Hall this establishment ought to be called!--"

Another momentary pause: then:

"-let's all sign a petition--"

"-no, a what-d'you-call-it-an ultimatum--"

"-just telling them straight--"

"Your bath, Earle--"

From the bathroom had come the gurgle of escaping water. Boiled pink, turbaned with her towel, smelling of somebody else's scented soap and radiating unrepentance that Earle's bath must be a tepid one, Burnett Minor bounced in.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, do lend me a dry towel, just to finish with. Oh, Causton, the curtsy, now that I've something loose on! Crocks! My cocoa, Major, and who said Priddy just now? 'Students do not fall in love with Priddy.' (I sha'n't hush.) Sugar, Mac, and, Causton, I wish you'd do my hair your way, just to see how it looks--"

And, twirling twice in the midst of a corolla of pink cashmere dressing-gown, she sank to the floor and began to nurse a chilblain on her heel.

Louie, her hands behind her head, leaned back and watched the scene with the greatest amusement. A master-rebel herself, she knew that here was no rebellion. The meeting, like other meetings, was merely letting off steam, and the girls who "wouldn't stand it" would be standing it exactly the same on the morrow. Well, on the morrow she herself would be off. Her boxes were only half unpacked; half-an-hour would put the other things back again. Already she saw that this Chesson's was an imposition. In the meantime, the indignation meeting was very amusing. She felt almost motherly towards these tractable revolutionaries. Her indulgence became still greater as they spoke out again.

"Another thing," a girl of Elwell's posse demanded; "why couldn't I go to Rainham yesterday to have my photograph taken?"

("Break the camera," Burnett Minor murmured to the chilblain.)

"And just because somebody'd bagged my boots and I was five minutes late the other day--"

"Je m'en fiche pas mal--" Pigou began.

("Parly Angly, voo affectay feele," from Burnett Minor.)

"I should like to see one of the gardeners at home looking at us the way Priddy does--"

"Or Miss Harriet either for that matter-she's only a sort of forewoman--"

"-applewoman--"

"-tomatoes--"

"-that's all she is really--"

"-nothing else--"

Louie laughed outright. Another gurgle had come from the bathroom, and Earle reappeared. Her announcement that the water was now cold added to the general sense of wrong.

"Not even enough hot water!"

"Scarcely a drop, ever!--"

"Odious!"

"Then will somebody come into my cubicle and rub me-not you, B Minor."

("Just give a squint out of the window, Elwell.")

("It's all right. Her lights are out. Lovey's too.")

"Well, I won't have a cold bath, to please Lovey or anybody else!"

Nor did Louie want one. She had risen. She moved to the window that looked out over the courtyard yew-the window from which watch was kept to see when Miss Harriet and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith retired-and yawned. In the middle of her yawn she suddenly laughed again.

"Good gracious!" she thought. It was too amusing.

Suddenly Richenda Earle, who also was standing by the window, spoke to her. Evidently Richenda did not think she had been fairly treated by the meeting.

"Do you think they ought to ask me to?" she complained.

Louie turned.

"To ask you to what?"

"To complain to Miss Harriet-me, the only Scholarship girl."

Louie shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. "Oh, they won't complain to Miss Harriet!"

"No-but one doesn't like to refuse things--" Earle said in injured tones.

Before Louie would have had time to reply to this, had she thought of replying to it, a diversion occurred. Nobody had heard steps approaching, but all at once the door opened, and Authority, in the person, not of Miss Harriet, but of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith herself, stood looking in. The hubbub ceased as the boiling of a kettle ceases when cold water is poured in. Several of the conspirators rose to their feet; Burnett Minor, making no bones about it, bolted behind a box. Great is even the look of Authority; it was almost a superfluity when Mrs. Lovenant-Smith asked in measured tones from the doorway: "What is the meaning of this?"

Already the tails of two dressing-gowns had vanished out of the other door.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Lovenant-Smith asked again.

Then she looked round to see on whom to fasten her displeasure.

Louie saw her look, and instantly fathomed its purpose. She and Richenda Earle stood by the window, as it were the dramatic centre of some Rembrandtesque composition to which all else was merely contributory. The Scholarship girl was going to get into a row. She, Louie, had lived for years among rows; and was leaving anyway on the morrow.

Before the "Miss Earle" had passed Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's lips Louie had stepped forward.

"We've been waiting for our baths," she said.

Perhaps already Mrs. Lovenant-Smith would have preferred Richenda Earle to Louie; there is expediency even in Authority; but the challenge, if it was that, was a public one. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith turned to Louie.

"Do you know what time it is?" she asked freezingly.

It pleased Louie to take Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's question au pied de la lettre.

"I'm afraid my watch is in my cubicle. I could tell you in a moment," she said.

This the Lady-in-Charge saw fit to ignore. She drew her own watch from her belt.

"It is ten minutes past eleven," she said. "Students are not out of bed at ten minutes past eleven. Neither are candles burning. Miss Earle--"

But again Louie interposed. After all, it was rough on the Scholarship girl.

"Miss Earle came in only a moment ago to send us to bed," she affirmed, without a tremor.

"Then," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, turning to Louie, and perhaps feeling herself once more headed off, "you, Miss Causton, as a new student, are perhaps not yet familiar with the Rules. Be so good as to come to me at ten o'clock to-morrow morning and I will explain them to you."

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith did not make the discomfited rebels file out past her. She herself retired with dignity. Students do not linger in the box-room when it is made known that they are expected to go to bed at once.

But no sooner had the door closed on Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's back than the pent-up general breath escaped again in a fluttering exhalation. In it were awe, delight, homage.

"Oh, Causton!" somebody breathed. "You are a brick!"

"Isn't she?"

"Wasn't it stunning of her?"

"You'd have caught it, Earle!"

"I saw it in her eye!"

"But I say, Causton, you'll get a wigging!"

"She didn't speak to you, you know!"

"You cut in--"

Louie felt quite confused, so much did they make of so little.

"Good gracious," she said, "what are you all talking about? That's nothing, especially as I was thinking of leaving in any case to-morrow."

There was consternation in the box-room. Had Rebellion found its leader only to lose her again immediately?

"Leaving!"

"Oh, I sha'n't leave till after ten o'clock now, you may be sure," Louie laughed.

"But-oh, I say!"

The dismayed voices dropped. There was a blank silence. It was only after half-a-minute that Burnett Minor, who had issued from cover again, begged: "Don't leave, Causton."

"Oh, I shouldn't leave because of anything like this," said Louie, enormously amused at the thought. "The place is a fraud-that's why I should leave."

"Oh, don't leave," another girl begged.

"Well, we'll see what she says to-morrow."

"She can't be too down on you--"

"Not the first time--"

Something that can only be described as a pleasant hardening came into Louie's grey eyes. Her laugh dropped a note. She looked at the adoring faces.

"That's just what I mean," she said. "If she is--"

"What?--"

"I'll stay."

And that also her stepfather would have described as "just like Louie."