And so on. He never got there, but I did feel sorry for him, so I listened just as hard as I could, which is less trying where you can eat than at other places. He was having a splendid time, when Miss Meek cut in to question me. “Student?” she boomed out, and she pronounced it, “Stew-dant.” I felt pleased, and I wanted to answer nicely, but I had at least six inches of spaghetti in my mouth--I hadn’t meant to take so much but it kept trailing up, and I had to lap it in--and so I had to nod. I should have waited a minute before I let that pleased feeling get on top, because she shoved it right over a cliff by her next remark, which was, “_Oh, my eye!_” and she followed that with a prodigious groan. It wasn’t very flattering. “But in a student pension,” began Mr. Hemmingway, “where the rates are lowered for others by the fact that practising makes the house--in some ways--less attractive, one must accept the handicap with grace. How well I remember in Vienna, when I, then quite a boy--let me see, _what was the year?_” “No matter!” barked Miss Bannister, and then Miss Meek added something, after another groan, that interested me considerably. “And two more coming!” she stated. “_Are_ there?” I asked quickly. “I do not lie,” she answered frigidly, and I stammered out something about not having meant that she did, but that I was interested. “Mees Leslie Parrish,” said Miss Julianna, who came in at the moment, after Beata who carried a big platter upon which were rounds of meat all wrapped in overcoats of cabbage leaves in which they had been baked, “and Mees Viola Harris-Clarke--” I was surprised, and I couldn’t quite believe it, because Leslie Parrish was Miss Sheila’s niece, and I couldn’t see quite why she was coming to study. Miss Sheila told me a good deal about Leslie while she visited us. I remember one day, while I sat on the guest room bed and helped Miss Sheila run two-toned ribbon--wonderfully lovely ribbon which was faint lavender on one side and pale peach pink on the other--into her beautiful under-things, that she, Miss Sheila, said her own niece _would_ have played well if she had ever learned to work. And I remember just how she looked as she tossed a chemise to a chair and said, “But unhappily, the child has been frightfully, and wrongly indulged--” It made me wonder a lot! I knew that Leslie Parrish’s father had lots of money, all the Parrish family are wealthy, and I knew that she spent her time going to parties and making visits, and entertaining, for Miss Sheila had told me that too. So I thought Miss Julianna must be mistaken, because, for Leslie, the Pension Dante would be very simple. “When did you hear this?” I asked. “A week, ten days past,” she answered, “in the cable. You did not know?” “No,” I answered, “I didn’t.” “I suppose you did. Miss Parrish also write for you--” “When are they to arrive?” asked Miss Meek.