To this question Mad Mathesis made no reply: she was busy drawing lines down the margins of the catalogue. "See," she said after a minute, "I've drawn three columns against the names of the pictures in the long room, and I want you to fill them with oughts and crosses--crosses for good marks and oughts for bad. The first column is for choice of subject, the second for arrangement, the third for colouring. And these are the conditions of the match. You must give three crosses to two or three pictures. You must give two crosses to four or five----" "Do you mean _only_ two crosses?" said Clara. "Or may I count the three-cross pictures among the two-cross pictures?" "Of course you may," said her aunt. "Any one, that has _three_ eyes, may be said to have _two_ eyes, I suppose?" Clara followed her aunt's dreamy gaze across the crowded gallery, half-dreading to find that there was a three-eyed person in sight. "And you must give one cross to nine or ten." "And which wins the match?" Clara asked, as she carefully entered these conditions on a blank leaf in her catalogue. "Whichever marks fewest pictures." "But suppose we marked the same number?" "Then whichever uses most marks." Clara considered. "I don't think it's much of a match," she said. "I shall mark nine pictures, and give three crosses to three of them, two crosses to two more, and one cross each to all the rest." "Will you, indeed?" said her aunt. "Wait till you've heard all the conditions, my impetuous child. You must give three oughts to one or two pictures, two oughts to three or four, and one ought to eight or nine. I don't want you to be _too_ hard on the R.A.'s." Clara quite gasped as she wrote down all these fresh conditions. "It's a great deal worse than Circulating Decimals!" she said. "But I'm determined to win, all the same!" Her aunt smiled grimly. "We can begin _here_," she said, as they paused before a gigantic picture, which the catalogue informed them was the "Portrait of Lieutenant Brown, mounted on his favorite elephant." "He looks awfully conceited!" said Clara. "I don't think he was the elephant's favorite Lieutenant. What a hideous picture it is! And it takes up room enough for twenty!" "Mind what you say, my dear!" her aunt interposed. "It's by an R.A.!" But Clara was quite reckless. "I don't care who it's by!" she cried. "And I shall give it three bad marks!" Aunt and niece soon drifted away from each other in the crowd, and for the next half-hour Clara was hard at work, putting in marks and rubbing them out again, and hunting up and down for suitable pictures. This she found the hardest part of all. "I _can't_ find the one I want!" she exclaimed at last, almost crying with vexation.