‘How should Madame know anything about it? And do you think she would care a straw if she did?’ retorted Daphne. ‘She will get paid exactly the same for us whether we are roaming at large in this lovely old forest, or grinding at grammar, and analysis, and Racine, and Lafontaine in the stuffy school-room at Asnières, where the train goes shrieking over the bridge every half-hour carrying happy people to Paris and gaiety, and theatres and operas, and all the good things of this life. What does Madame Tolmache care, so long as we are out of mischief? And I don’t see how we can get into any mischief here, unless that lovely green lizard we saw darting up the gray rock just now should turn into an adder and sting us to death.’ ‘If Miss Toby hadn’t a headache we couldn’t have come out without her,’ said Martha musingly. ‘May Toby and her headache flourish! If she had been well enough to come with us we should have been crawling along the dusty white road at the edge of the forest, and should never have got here. Toby has corns. And now I am going to sketch,’ said Daphne in an authoritative tone. ‘You can do your crochet: for I really suppose now that to you and a certain class of intellects there is a kind of pleasure to be derived from poking an ivory hook into a loop of berlin wool and pulling it out again. But please sit so that I can’t see your work, Dibb dear. The very look of that fluffy wool on this hot day almost suffocates me.’ Daphne produced her drawing-block and opened her colour-box, and settled herself in a half-recumbent position on the great granite slab, and surveyed the wide landscape below her with that gaze of calm patronage which the amateur artist bestows on grand, illimitable, untranslatable Nature. She looked across the vast valley, with its silver streak of river and its distant spires, its ever varying lights and shadows—a scene which Turner would have contemplated with awe and a sense of comparative impotence; but which ignorance, as personified by Daphne, surveyed complacently, wondering where she should begin. ‘I think it will make a pretty picture,’ she said, ‘if I can succeed with it.’ ‘Why don’t you do a tree, or a cottage, or something, as the drawing-master said we ought to do—just one simple little thing that one could draw correctly?’ asked Martha, who was provokingly well furnished with the aggravating quality of commonsense. ‘Drawing-masters are such grovellers,’ said Daphne, dashing in a faint outline with her facile pencil. ‘I would rather go on making splendid failures all my life than creep along the dull path of mediocre merit by the lines and rules of a drawing-master. I have no doubt this is going to be a splendid failure, and I shall do a devil’s dance upon it presently, as Müller used in the woods near Bristol, when he couldn’t please himself. But it amuses one for the moment,’ concluded Daphne, with whom life was all in the present, and self the centre of the universe.