Looking round her, she saw mainly experts. To take the example nearest at hand: there was Monsieur Legros, the French master; well, Maria could twist him round her little finger. She only needed to pout her thick, red lips, or to give a coquettish twist to her plump figure, or to ogle him with her fine, bold, blue eyes, and the difficult questions in the lesson were sure to pass her by.--Once she had even got ten extra marks added to an examination paper, in this easy fashion. Whereas, did she, Laura, try to imitate Maria, venture to pout or to smirk, it was ten to one she would be rebuked for impertinence. No, she got on best with the women-teachers, to whom red lips and a full bust meant nothing; while the most elderly masters could not be relied on to be wholly impartial, where a pair of magnificent eyes was concerned. Even Mr. Strachey, the unapproachable, had been known, on running full tilt into a pretty girl's arms in an unlit passage, to be laughingly confused. Laura was not, of course, the sole outsider in these things; sprinkled through the College were various others, older, too, than she, who by reason of demureness of temperament, or immersion in their work, stood aloof. But they were lost in the majority, and, as it chanced, none of them belonged to Laura's circle. Except Chinky--and Chinky did not count. So, half-fascinated, half-repelled, Laura set to studying her friends with renewed zeal. She could not help admiring their proficiency in the art of pleasing, even though she felt a little abashed by the open pride they took in their growing charms. There was Bertha, for instance, Bertha who had one of the nicest minds of them all; and yet how frankly gratified she was, by the visible rounding of her arms and the curving of her bust. She spoke of it to Laura with a kind of awe; and her voice seemed to give hints of a coming mystery. Tilly, on the other hand, lived to reduce her waist-measure: she was always sucking at lemons, and she put up with the pains of indigestion as well as a red tip to her nose; for no success in school meant as much to Tilly as the fact that she had managed to compress herself a further quarter of an inch, no praise on the part of her teachers equalled the compliments this earned her from dressmaker and tailor. As for Inez, who had not only a pretty face but was graceful and slender-limbed as a greyhound, Inez no longer needed to worry over artificial charms, or to dwell self-consciously on her development; serious admirers were not lacking, and with one of these, a young man some eight years older than herself, she had had for the past three months a sort of understanding. For her, as for so many others, the time she had still to spend at school was as purgatory before paradise. To top all, one of the day-scholars in Laura's class was actually engaged to be married; and in no boy-and-girl fashion, but to a doctor who lived and practised in Emerald Hill: he might sometimes be seen,