Dorothy evidently did, for she subsided quietly into her desk, and the other girls took warning and behaved themselves. For five minutes a blessed peace reigned in IIB. Nobody was more absolutely thankful when the eleven o'clock bell rang than Lesbia. The ordeal of her first lesson was over, and, though things had not gone altogether smoothly, she had managed the form by herself, and had not been obliged to call in the assistance of any other teacher to read the riot act. "They're imps! Sixteen cheeky, mischievous imps!" she decided, as she walked round the gymnasium eating her biscuit lunch. "But I believe I can tackle them. I dare say I shall have a row or two now and then, and I don't mean to stand any nonsense from either Madam Dorothy Holding or Jess Morrison. All the same, Lesbia Ferrars, you didn't think you could do it, and you _have_ done it. That's something to sing 'O, Jubilate' about at any rate. You'll lick those kids into shape before you've done with them. Help! What a life! It's going to be a facer of a term." CHAPTER VIII Before the Curtain When Lesbia looked back upon the events of the last few months, and compared the beginning of the September term with the present January one, she decided that she felt quite a hundred years older. Whether such a swift and sudden growing-up was unalloyed bliss was a matter for debate, but at any rate it gave her a certain feeling of self-reliance that was rather gratifying. In the Patterson household she was in a different world from that of the Hiltons. Paul and Minnie had been very, very kind, but they treated her entirely as a child, and had never even discussed her future in her presence. Paul, chivalrous towards women, but old-fashioned in his ideas of their sphere, liked girls to be brought up in cotton-wool, and thought the home provided quite a wide enough field for their energies. He considered "careers" unfeminine, and admired the mid-Victorian days, when the daughters of the house dusted the drawing-room and arranged the flowers, paid calls, played tennis, and helped at bazaars, but left college life and the professions to their brothers. Mrs. Patterson took just the opposite view of things. She was intensely modern, and considered that every girl ought to be trained for some special career as much as every boy. Her own daughters were studying hard, Kitty for medicine, and Joan for secretarial work. She looked forward to their future prospects with as much interest as to those of her sons, Derrick, Stuart, and Godfrey. Having accepted Lesbia as an inmate of the household, she tried to train her in her own particular school of ideas. She was kind in her way, but not at all tender. Even to her own children she would only bestow the merest peck of a kiss. She was quite uncompromising with her young cousin, kept her remorselessly to home preparation or piano practice, and demanded high standards in respect of punctuality, exactitude of expression, and general alertness.