That she was homesick for him or for home—but indeed the two words were synonyms to her—we already know; but when the prospect of a finishing school had been first mooted, she had made up her curious mind, so plastic and yet so stubborn, that she would not be silly again as she had been when she was young (surely the Great Gulf is fixed between twelve and sixteen) and that it was worth her while to buy with only two black years the chance of growing as good and great and wise as Justin—that is to say, nearly as good and as great and as wise. She knew her limitations. And then, when she came back, she would be able to be friends with Justin—real friends—not a little girl to be played with any more.... She would be ‘adequate’.... She was very jealous of that adjective. “Adequate! Oh, an awfully adequate chap!”... Justin was always saying that people he approved were “adequate”.... Very good.... He should say so of her.... To that end, behold her tethered, a willing sacrifice, to a French Grammar and verbs of unmentionable irregularity! Also, a second motive for docility, there were studios in Paris—pictures—statues of the gods—teachers of the Arts—one Rodin and a thing called a _Salon_. She might learn to paint, really paint! She got her way. She had been sent to a quiet, middle-class _pension_, owned by intelligent women, who taught the newcomers themselves, while the French girls and the more advanced foreigners attended various classes. It was easy to find a studio for Laura. And so, for nearly two years, she worked three days a week, and for three days sat enchanted, soaking herself in strange oils, smeared from her eyebrows to her aching palette thumb, painting portraits and dreaming dreams. And tragic Monsieur La Motte, that great artist who could not paint, who taught victoriously by word of mouth, because his art must out and his hands could not obey him, Monsieur La Motte, swan-herd fallen on hard times, yet ever alert for a cygnet in the gaggle of geese he must drive for a living, Monsieur La Motte watched and peered and waited. At last, when her two years were nearly at an end, and the studio-talk that frothed like a fountain was less of Cubism and the expensiveness of rose-madder, Ingres, Bergson, Strindberg, symbolic colour schemes and _the Eternal Return_ (for they were an enquiring, philosophical crew) and more and more and ever more of England and its delectable villages, high in the Kentish hills, he could contain himself no longer. He assumed his conspiratorial hat and went, then and there, to call upon his old friends the Demoiselles Dunois.