Julia's views on the subject of satellites were even more pronounced. She enjoyed a painful popularity in the Second Cours, and there were always half a dozen children abjectly and irritatingly in love with her. She was held to be the cleverest girl in the school, a reputation skilfully maintained by an unbroken superciliousness of demeanour. Her handsome mouth was set in scornful lines; her words, except to chosen friends, were few and cold. She carried on an internecine warfare with Madame Bouron, fighting that redoubtable nun with her own weapons,--icy composure, a mock humility, and polite phrases that carried a hidden sting. It was for this, for her arrogance,--she was as contemptuous as a cat,--and for a certain elusiveness, suggestive even to my untrained mind of new and strange developments, that I surrendered to her for a season all of my heart,--all of it, at least, that was not the permanent possession of Madame Rayburn and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was not playing the game. She was nobody's satellite just then, being occupied with a new cult for a new nun, whom it pleased her to have us all adore. The new nun, Madame Dane, was a formidable person, whom, left to myself, I should have timorously avoided; but for whom, following Elizabeth's example, I acquired in time a very creditable enthusiasm. She was tall and high-shouldered, and she had what Colly Cibber felicitously describes as a "poking head." We, who had yet to hear of Colly Cibber, admired this peculiar carriage,--Elizabeth said it was aristocratic,--and we imitated it as far as we dared, which was not very far, our shoulders being as rigorously supervised as our souls. Any indication of a stoop on _my_ part was checked by an hour's painful promenade up and down the corridor, with a walking-stick held between my elbows and my back, and a heavy book balanced on my head. The treatment was efficacious. Rather than be so wearisomely ridiculous, I held myself straight as a dart.