The Patterson household was well stocked with books, but had no art effects. A glue brush and a pot of white enamel were the utmost they could muster in the matter of painting paraphernalia. Even a Raphael's genius would have been hampered by such elementary stock-in-trade. Lesbia came to the sorrowful conclusion that life for the present must be lived without an oil paint-box. But the lack of this means of "self-expression" did not curtail the strong artistic instincts that were stirring in her. She found herself always looking for the pictorial aspect of things, and thinking how she could transfer them to canvas. When she was teaching the juniors she would watch Maisie Martin's head bent over her dictation book, and think how beautifully the outline of that pink cheek and the ruddy hair might be rendered against a silver-grey background. She would sometimes surreptitiously sketch the children's attitudes in her notebook, rejoicing over the graceful turn of an arm, or the subtle curve of a white neck, while its owner, conscious of her gaze, wondered what black score was being entered on the time-sheet. Even in the midst of scolding her tiresome flock the artistic side would crop out, and she would register mental impressions of the dancing light in naughty Esmée's dark eyes, the beautiful shape of Sylvia's little hand that was holding the pen all wrong, and the silky sheen on Gwennie's flaxen hair, as that irrepressible damsel fidgeted at her desk. If her small pupils could only have been artist's models, the hours spent with them would have been a pleasure instead of a daily dread. In her own form, too, Lesbia was allowing herself to drift into a dreamy habit of art observation instead of mental concentration. She sketched on the borders of her textbooks and on her blotting-paper, and was even guilty of purloining bits of coloured chalk from the blackboard box, and smudging impressionistic portraits of her comrades on spare pages of essay paper. Worse than this, her imagination was apt to absolutely run away with her. Miss Pratt one day, lecturing on English Literature, gave a critical survey of Keats's poems. "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" fascinated Lesbia instantly, and her brain danced off to create a picture of the scene. She visualized the exact drooping pose of Isabella, the hang of her dark hair, the drapery of her rich dress, the reflection of sunlight on the brass pot, the peep of mediæval landscape seen between curtains in the background, the tear that must glitter on Isabella's long lashes, her look of hopeless despair, and the rich scheme of colour that must run through the whole picture. "Quote the terms in which the _Edinburgh Review_ summed up its criticism of 'Endymion'?" asked Miss Pratt.