As for my deeper and more absorbing passion for Julia Reynolds, I could not hope to separate it, or at least to make her separate it, from the passions of her other satellites. She regarded us all with a cold and impartial aversion, which was not without excuse, in view of our reprehensible behaviour. Three times a day the Second Cours filed through the First Cours classroom, on its way to the refectory. The hall was always empty, as the older girls preceded us to our meals; but at noon their hats and coats and shawls were laid neatly out upon their chairs, ready to be put on as soon as dinner was eaten. Julia Reynolds had a black and white plaid shawl, the sight of which goaded us to frenzy. If Madame Dane's eyes were turned for one instant from our ranks, some daring child shot madly across the room, wrenched a bit of fringe from this beloved shawl, and, returning in triumph with her spoil, wore it for days (I always lost mine) pinned as a love-knot to the bib of her alpaca apron. Viola Milton performed this feat so often that she became purveyor of fringe to less audacious girls, and gained honour and advantages thereby. Not content with such vandalism, she conceived the daring project of stealing a lock of hair. She hid herself in a music room, and, when Julia went by to her music lesson, stole silently behind her, and snipped off the end of one of her long brown braids. This, with the generosity of a highwayman, she distributed, in single hairs, to all who clamoured for them. To me she gave half a dozen, which I gummed up for safe-keeping in an envelope, and never saw again. It was a little trying that Viola--certainly, as I have made plain, the least deserving of us all--should have been the only child who ever obtained a word of kindness from our divinity. But this was the irony of fate. Three days after the rape of the lock, she was sent to do penance for one of her many misdemeanours by sitting under the clock in the corridor, a post which, for some mysterious reason, was consecrated to the atonement of sin. In an hour she returned, radiant, beatified. Julia Reynolds had gone by on her way to the chapel; and seeing the little solitary figure--which looked pathetic, though it wasn't--had given her a fleeting smile, and had said "Poor Olie," as she passed. This was hard to bear. It all came, as I pointed out acrimoniously to Tony, of Viola's being at least a head shorter than she had any business to be at ten years old, and of her having such absurdly thin legs, and great, melancholy eyes. Of course people felt sorry for her, whereas they might have known--they ought to have known--that she was incapable of being abashed. She would just as soon have sat astride the clock as under it.