Anyhow, the ridiculous gushing assistant managed bit by bit to get the whole direction of the establishment into her own hands, while the old dame to whom the school belonged became as plastic to her will as were butter, sugar or wax to her clever fingers; and when the old lady died she left her the school. It was an old rambling red-brick house with a large pleasant garden, and stood a little back from the high-road, about half a mile beyond the west gate of Lud-in-the-Mist. The Academy represented to the ladies of Lud all that they knew of romance. They remembered the jokes they had laughed at within its walls, the secrets they had exchanged walking up and down its pleached alleys, far more vividly than anything that had afterwards happened to them. Do not for a moment imagine that they were sentimental about it. The ladies of Lud were never sentimental. It was as an old comic song that they remembered their school-days. Perhaps it is always with a touch of wistfulness that we remember old comic songs. It was at any rate as near as the ladies of Lud could get to the poetry of the past. And whenever Dame Marigold Chanticleer and Dame Dreamsweet Vigil and the rest of the old pupils of the Academy foregathered to eat syllabub and marzipan and exchange new stitches for their samplers, they would be sure sooner or later to start bandying memories about these funny old days and the ridiculous doings of Miss Primrose Crabapple. "Oh, do you remember," Dame Marigold would cry, "how she wanted to start what she called a 'Mother's Day', when we were all to dress up in white and green, and pretend to be lilies standing on our mothers' graves?" "Oh, yes!" Dame Dreamsweet would gurgle, "And mother was so angry when she found out about it. 'How dare the ghoulish creature bury me alive like this?' she used to say." And then they would laugh till the tears ran down their cheeks. Each generation had its own jokes and its own secrets; but they were always on the same pattern; just as when one of the china cups got broken, it was replaced by another exactly like it, with the same painted border of squills and ivy. There were squills and ivy all over the Academy, embroidered on the curtains in each bedroom, and on all the cushions and screens, painted in a frieze around the wall of the parlour, and even stamped on the pats of butter. For one of Miss Primrose Crabapple's follies was a romantic passion for Duke Aubrey--a passion similar to that cherished by highchurch spinsters of the last century for the memory of Charles I. Over her bed hung a little reproduction in water-colours of his portrait in the Guildhall. And on the anniversary of his fall, which was kept in Dorimare as a holiday, she always appeared in deep mourning.