"Oh, `dunce' is too strong a word, Chubby! He was not brilliant, but you must remember that he suffered from contrast with his companions. Rex was very bright, if he was not exactly clever, and it is not often that you come across such a really scholarly boy as Rob Darcy!" Peggy busied herself with the arrangement of the tea-tray without glancing in her friend's direction, and with an air of studied carelessness. She herself knew that she had dragged Rob's name into the discussion for no other object than to set Mellicent's ready tongue to work on a subject about which she was longing for information, and she was alarmed lest her intention might be suspected. Mellicent, however, had retained her comfortable obtuseness, and rose to the bait with innocent alacrity. "Well, I don't know if _you_ call it scholarly to think of nothing in the world but beetles, and grubby little plants that no one ever heard of before; but _I_ call it idiotic. He is worse than Esther, because, after all, schoolboys are human creatures, and sometimes you can't help liking them, though they are so tiresome, but nobody could love a beetle! I said so once to Rob, and he snubbed me dreadfully, and talked at me for half an hour. I didn't understand half he said--for it was all in technical beetley language, but it was meant to prove that it was wrong to say anything of the sort, or refuse to see the beauty hidden away in the meanest created thing." "Quite true! I agree with Rob. He was perfectly right." "But, Peggy, a beetle! And to care for nothing else! You have no idea what a regular old hermit Rob has become. He is perfectly wrapped up in beetles!" cried Mellicent, with a descriptive elegance of diction, at which her hearer shuddered visibly. "He takes no interest in anything else!" Peggy smiled, and her head took a complacent tilt. "That's bad! That will have to be altered. He'll take interest in _me_, my dear, or there'll be trouble! I believe in a man devoting himself to his work, but Rob is too nice to be allowed to bury himself completely. I must rouse him up! A fortnight from now we will meet again, and the treatment will begin. Meanest creatures are all very well in their way, but superior ones demand their own share of attention. Rob always did as I told him, and he will not disappoint me now." Mellicent gazed at her friend in reflective fashion. She called up before her a picture of Rob's great stooping form, his shaggy head, and overhanging brows, and contrasted it mentally with that of the slim little, neat little, prettiest of elf-like figures before her. No, it was not in the least likely that Rob would disappoint Peggy Saville. "Those dreadful Savilles" had now, as ever, the power of enforcing obedience from their vassals. "But all the same," she repeated obstinately, "but all the same he would have liked you better if you had been a beetle!" CHAPTER SIX.