Which is all as it should be!

“Yes! but,” continued, let’s call her Annie Smith; she does not appear in the book again so that it really does not matter about her nomenclature.  “I could just see Leonie from my desk and she was smiling all over her face and romping, simply romping through the French papers.”

“Oh! but,” sympathised, let us call her Susan Brown for the same reason that we christened Annie Smith, “she has a brain!”

Nice Susan Brown hadn’t, but balanced the lack by a wealthy parentage.

“Yes! of course she has!  And isn’t she beautiful!”

Nice Annie Smith was as plain as a bun, but balanced her defect by a heart of gold, and found her ultimate and perfect joy in an overworked curate and seven children by him, all of whom were destined to sit round the festive board like seven plain little currantless buns on a plate.

“Yes! isn’t she!  She’s wonderful, I think, and oh! so very different to all of us.”

“I found the very word to suit her in the dictionary,” rather importantly added Susan Brown, “bizarre——­”

“Whatever does it mean?” inquired Annie Smith, who was destined never again to run up against the word or its meaning during the rest of her neutral life.

“Er—­a kind of a—­er—­je ne sais quoi in the temperament—­not exactly a nonconformist, you know; but just a little—­well, not quite like us!”

“I see!” contentedly replied mystified Annie Smith.  “But I do love her; she’s such a dear.  So gentle and so ready to help everybody, and so splendid at sports.  What tremendous friends she and Jessica have become, haven’t they, since the night of the scare?  I often wonder what made her walk in her sleep like that; she’s never done it since.”

“Indigestion, I’ve always thought.  Cookie was away on her holidays, if you remember, and her locum tenens, understudy, you know, made pastry like cement; I always thought, too, that Principal gave her that lovely little room right away from the rest of us on account of it—­the sleep-walking, I mean.  I’m sure I should have died if I’d found her standing over me in the moonlight in the middle of the night.  It must be awfully jolly though having someone in India who writes to you every three months. Isn’t she lucky to have been born in India, and to have had an ayah, a kind of native nurse, you know, who still worships her, and writes to her, and sends real Indian presents, and to have had a V.C. for a father—­Leonie, I mean?”

Annie Smith laughed that happy laugh which is the outcome of a perfectly contented mind.  “She deserves all the luck she gets, and what luck for us having her as head next term.  What a favourite she is with everyone, even old Signer Valenti!  Oh, dear, I wish to-morrow’s exams were over; my fingers feel just like blanc-mange when I think of that nocturne.”