The girls always felt that it made a change to have anybody coming in from the outside world. The one disadvantage of a boarding-school is that mistresses and pupils, shut up together, and seeing one another week in, week out, are rather apt to get on each others' nerves. At a day school the girls take their worries home at four o'clock, and the mental atmosphere has time to clear before nine next morning; but, when there is no home-going until the end of the term, little trifles are sometimes unduly magnified, and a narrow element--the bane of all communities--begins to creep in. To do Miss Beasley justice, she made a great effort to combat this very evil, and to run her school on broad lines. She recognized the necessity of letting the girls mix sometimes with outsiders. In a country place it was impossible to take them to concerts or entertainments, but they occasionally joined the rambles of the County Antiquarian Society or the local Natural History Club. It occurred to Miss Beasley that it would be an excellent plan to throw open some of Professor Marshall's lectures to residents in the neighbourhood, asking those people who attended to stay to tea afterwards, thus giving her girls an opportunity of acting as hostesses, and entertaining them with conversation. A short course of four lectures on geology was announced, and quite a number of local ladies responded to the invitation. The girls received the news with mixed feelings. "Rather a jink!" ventured Ardiune. "It'll be queer to see rows of strangers sitting in the lecture room! Did you say we've to give them tea when the Professor's done talking?" "Yes, and talk to them ourselves too, worse luck! I'm sure I shan't know what to say!" fluttered Aveline. "Oh, the monitresses will do that part of the business!" decided Raymonde easily. "We'll stand in the background, and just look ladylike and well-mannered, and all the rest of it." "Will you, my child? Not if the Bumble knows it! She's nuts on this afternoon-tea dodge! (I don't care--I shan't put a penny in the slang box--Hermie isn't here to listen and make me!) Gibbie told me that we're all to act hostesses in turn. We're to be divided into four sets, and each take a time." "Help! How are you going to divide twenty-six by four? It works out at six and a half. Who's to be the half girl?" "Oh! They'll make it seven on one afternoon and six the next, I expect." "That's not fair! It's throwing too much work on those six and not enough on the seven. It's opposed to all the instincts of co-operation and justice which Gibbie has laboured so hard to instil into me." "Don't see how the Bumble can manage otherwise, unless she chops a girl in half. No, I predict you'll be chosen among a select six, and have to pour out tea and hand cakes with one-sixth extra power laid on, and your conversation carefully modulated to your hearers." "Oh, Jemima!"