Once Pip had forced his way into demand a few stitches for his braces which had split, and she had been compelled to wrap her whole face hastily up in a towel and declare she had violent neuralgia, and he must go to Esther or one of the servants.  Had he seen and known the cause there would have been no end to the teasing.

Nowadays Meg spent a great deal of time in her bedroom, that she had all to herself while Judy was away.  In its privacy she trimmed and retrimmed her hats, altered her dresses, read her novels, and sat in front of the looking-glass with her hair down, dreaming of being quite grown up and in love.  For just now both to Aldith, and herself that state of life seemed the only one altogether lovely and desirable.  Meg used to curl herself up in a big easy-chair that had drifted to her room because its springs were broken, and dream long, beautiful, hopeless dreams of a lover with “long black lashes and a soldierly carriage.”  Of course it was highly reprehensible to have such thoughts at the tender age of sixteen, but then the child had no mother to check that erring imagination, and she was a daughter of the South.

Australian girls nearly always begin to think of “lovers and nonsense,” as middlefolks call it, long before their English aged sisters do.  While still in the short-frock period of existence, and while their hair is still free-flowing, they take the keenest interest in boys—­boys of neighbouring schools, other girls’ brothers, young bank clerks, and the like.  Not because they would be good playmates, but because they look at them in the light of possible “sweethearts.”  I do not say English girl children are free from this.  By no means; in every school there may be found one or two this way inclined, giggling, forward young things who want whipping and sending to play cricket or dolls again.  But in this land of youthfulness it is the rule more frequently than the exception, and herein lies the chief defect of the very young Australian girl.  She is like a peach, a beautiful, smooth, rich peach, that has come to ripeness almost in a day, and that hastens to rub off the soft, delicate bloom that is its chief charm, just to show its bright, warm colouring more clearly.  Aldith had, to her own infinite satisfaction, brushed away her own “bloom,” and was at present busily engaged in trying to remove Meg’s, which was very soft and lovely before she touched it.  The novels had taken away a little, and the “Block” a little more, but, Meg was naturally freshminded, and it took time to make much difference.  Just now, under her friend’s tutelage, she was being inducted into the delightful mysteries of sweethearting, and for the time, it quite filled her some what purposeless young life.  But it all ended with an adventure that years afterwards used to make her cheeks tingle painfully at the thought.