"Yes, Master Reggie, you have the right of it there. Whatever Miss Annabel sets herself to do, she'll do well: no manner of doubt on that point. She's always from a child been one to do her duty: I will say that for her. It's only when she sets about doing other people's duty that she begins to get troublesome." "The Dean and Chapter may possibly find it troublesome when she begins to do their duty," I suggested. "That's their business and not mine, Master Reggie. Miss Annabel has been my business for close on fifty years, and I'm glad to hand her on to somebody else. Not that I'm not fond of her, for I am, and have been ever since I took her on from the monthly nurse forty-nine years ago: but she was a handful from a baby, though always a fine child, with a skin as fair as a lily, and hair that curled quite easy and kept in curl, though I can't pretend as it ever curled natural, because it didn't. But I'd no trouble in curling it as some folks have. I remember a woman at Poppenhall, whose children's hair was as straight as never was, though she put it in curling-papers every night of their lives, feeling she didn't like to be bested by her own children's hair, as you might say. But instead of taking the curl any better, it all came off, the curling-papers having stopped the natural growth; and those children's heads were as bare as billiard-balls. I suppose it was a judgment on her for going against nature." "But you went against nature in curling Miss Annabel's hair, and yet no judgment seems to have fallen upon you," said I, as I thought pertinently. "That was quite different, Master Reggie." Like the rest of her kind, Ponty recognised the incalculable difference between her own case and the case of everybody else. "Although Miss Annabel's hair didn't curl what you might call naturally, like yours, it was very easy to curl, and it kept in something beautiful: and it seemed very hard for your poor mamma to have a boy whose curls had to be cut off and a girl who hadn't any. And then her ladyship's children were her ladyship's children, and not like ordinary common folk." Ponty's logic always roused my wonder and admiration. While she was speaking, my wandering gaze fell upon two portraits hung on the nursery wall: a fat little girl with pink cheeks and blue eyes, and stiff curls like great yellow sausages, who was dressed in a white frock and a blue sash; and a thin, little, dark-eyed boy with pale cheeks and terrible brown ringlets, and who was disfigured still further by a green velvet suit and a ghastly lace collar. These caricatures were supposed to reproduce Annabel and myself in early youth; and in Ponty's eyes they represented the perfection of personal beauty as depicted by the highest form of human art.