She nodded, then added, "I want to be like them and like myself, too." "You think quite a lot of yourself?" "Oh, no!" She shook her head vehemently. "It isn't that at all. I think I'm--I'm not anything I want to be. It's just that there are certain things outside me and the way I feel about them that I wouldn't want changed. The way I feel about the mountains and the lake. And stars. I love them so very much. And I don't think the others really care about them. I don't think they really see them. And it's the way I feel about things like the mountains and the lake and stars that I wouldn't want changed." "You want a great deal, my little Flip," Georges Laurens said, gently stroking Ariel's head, "when you want to be exactly like everybody else and yet be different at the same time." Paul reached for another chestnut and rolled lazily onto his back. "I sympathize with you, Flip. It's horrible to be in an institution. Couldn't you have stayed at home with your parents?" "I wanted to," Flip said, "but Gram's in New York and right now my father's in China, and my mother's dead. I wanted to travel around with father but he said he was going to go to all sorts of places I couldn't go, and I couldn't miss school anyhow." Remembering her promise to Madame Perceval she added, "and I don't hate school nearly as much as I used to, Paul. Truly I don't." "What do you like about it?" Paul asked bluntly. "Oh, lots of things," Flip said vaguely. "Well--look at all the things you can learn at school you couldn't learn by yourself. I mean not only dull things. Art, for instance. Madame Perceval's taught me all kinds of things in a few months." "Go on," Paul said. "And skiing--Fräulein Hauser's going to teach me to ski." "I know how to ski," Paul said. Flip tried again. "Well, there's music. They teach us lots about music and that's fun." "This is the best way to learn about music," Paul said, going to the phonograph and turning it on. "You don't have to be in school to listen to good music." Flip gave up. The record on the victrola was Bach's _Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring_. It was music that Flip knew and she sat quietly staring into the fire and listening. It was the first time in three years that she had been able to listen to that music. At home in New York in the Christmases of her childhood her mother had played it and played it. The Christmas after her mother's death Flip had found the record broken and was glad. But now she was listening to it with a kind of peace. She looked over at Paul and said softly, "My mother used to love that...." But Paul did not hear. He jumped up and turned off the record before it had played to the end and said, "Let's go for a walk."