SCHOOL, after the first hot indignation, had proved not so bad. It was a simple and more impersonal matter to share with a dozen than with one. Besides, expecting an atmosphere like warm clinging toffee, sweet and sentimental and tenacious, she had found instead a community of off-hand young women, encouraged by their mistresses to strive for fitness, hygiene and efficiency--a collection of embryo Ninas, in fact. Ursula adapted herself swiftly to these conditions, glad that too cloying intimacy was “not done.” She was not by any means the Favourite of the School nor the Queen of the Upper Fifth.... The night of the fancy-dress ball was the first time she was ever conspicuous at Miss Luther’s. When Douglas Barrison saw her again, she was sedate in navy blue and a white flannel shirt; Gwen’s little friend on a week’s visit to the house; very shy and unimportant; hair in a “door-knocker.” “Yes, thank you, Mr. Barrison, I enjoyed the dance very much----” But no repetition of wild and vivid behaviour would have fascinated him like this sudden baffling change and withdrawal. He won her on scenery, mainly. Big lonely romantic scenery. Wide Pacific seas, the Southern Cross overhead.... She thought he found difficulty in talking about it all--“Civilization’s all right--but sometimes a man feels he wants to be up against things ... to sleep on a bed of fern or the hard earth itself----” When Doug stayed overnight with friends, he would nearly always, with his peculiarly jolly, open-air laugh, reject the comforts of the spare room. “Oh, I’m an old campaigner.... I can turn in anywhere ... on the floor--in a barn. Once, I remember, I slept----” His sufferings when he wore a collar and trousers and such ordinary European raiment, and his relief when he could cast them off, seemed almost disproportionately exaggerated. “A loose shirt and a pair of old shorts’ll do me any time, thank you.” He liked makeshifts in the midst of civilization: to find a door locked so that he had to enter by a window, genuinely pleased him. It was so virile. A row was virile, too.... It was disappointing to pugnacity when coal-heavers, navvies and bargees were civil.