The bell rang. Out here on the balcony it did not sound so loud. She heard the girls in her class putting books, records, note paper, into their lockers and slamming the doors, and she knew that she would have to come in and follow them upstairs. But not yet. Not quite yet. It would take them a little while to get everything put away. She heard someone else walking along the path below and looked down and recognized Madame Perceval. Madame Perceval stopped just below Flip's balcony and leaned against one of the plane trees. She stood there very quietly, looking down over the lake. She thinks it's beautiful, too, Flip thought, and suddenly felt happier. She scrambled to her feet and went back into the Common Room just as Gloria and a group of girls were leaving. They saw her. "Oh, here comes Pill!" Gloria shouted. "Hello, Pill!" they all cried. The brief happiness faded from Flip's eyes. 7 Almost the most difficult thing, Flip found, was never being alone. From the moment she woke up in the morning until she fell asleep at night, she was surrounded by girls. She was constantly with them but she never felt that she was of them. She tried to talk and laugh, to be like them, to join in their endless conversations about boys and holidays, and clothes and boys, and growing up and again boys, but always it seemed that she grew clumsier than ever and the wrong words tumbled out of her mouth. She felt like the ugly sister in the fairy tale she had loved when she was younger, the sister whose words turned into hideous toads; and all the other girls were like the beautiful sister whose words became pieces of gold. And she would stand on the hockey field when they chose teams, looking down at her toe scrounging into the grass and pretend that she didn't care when the team which had the bad luck to get her let out a groan, or the gym teacher, Fräulein Hauser, snapped. "Philippa Hunter! How can you be so clumsy!" And Miss Tulip glossed over Jackie's untidy drawers and chided Flip because her comb and brush were out of line. And Miss Armstrong, the science teacher, cried. "Really, Philippa, can't you enter the classroom without knocking over a chair?" And when she fell and skinned her knees Miss Tulip was angry with her for tearing her stockings and even seemed to grudge the iodine which she put on Flip's gory wounds. --If only I knew a lot of boys and could talk about them, she thought,--or if I was good at sports. But she had never really known any boys and sports were a nightmare to her.