Lesbia started. She had been so busy fixing details of her proposed picture of Isabella that all further particulars of the lecture had passed unheard. She had not the ghost of a notion what the _Edinburgh Review_ had said about "Endymion", except a shadowy impression that they had slated it. "They--they--didn't like it," she stammered lamely. The form giggled faintly. Miss Pratt cleared her throat in the ominous manner that always preluded trouble. "I never thought you conspicuously bright, Lesbia Ferrars," she remarked scathingly; "but you're really outdoing yourself to-day. The criticism of the _Edinburgh Review_ on Keats's poem would equally well describe your attitude of mind. Yes, Carrie, you may give it," nodding to another quarter of the room. "Calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy," quoted Carrie. At which the faint giggle swelled again, but subsided at a glance from the teacher. Lesbia sat up straight, banishing Isabella and all possible shapes of basil pots from her brain, and pinched her finger to try and keep concentration on the lesson, though the portrait of Keats himself, with his poetic blue eyes and ruddy chestnut curls, danced sometimes before her like an æsthetic will o' the wisp to lead her astray. "I'm an artistic peg in a scholastic hole," she said to herself, rather pleased with her own simile. Miss Pratt, however, took no notice of the shapes of pegs or of holes. She was there for the purpose of giving a literature lesson, out of which she meant her girls to get the utmost possible profit. She had no patience with what she considered "slacking", and she kept a keen eye on Lesbia for the rest of the hour, asking her questions whenever she perceived any signs of straying attention. Lesbia sketched her picture during geometry on the back page of her exercise book, but it was a scratchy performance and quite unworthy of her high ideals. She covered it hastily lest the mistress should see it. "If they'd only let us choose our own work at the High School I'd vote for a life-class," she sighed, taking up her compasses and trying to focus her wandering mind on circles and angles and letters of the alphabet, instead of the outlines of the human form divine.