Morbid or not, however, her lips almost shaped the words, slowly and deliberately: that boy with the red waistcoat would do well to be careful. He would do especially well to be careful if, after this, after the glare on the other's face, he should still have help offered him with his studies or be asked for a bath. For something would happen then. Eggshells such as he did not come into collision with bronze without something happening. And if anything not easily to be accounted for did happen to that odious little whippersnapper, nothing would ever persuade Louie that she did not know a likely quarter in which to look for the reason. Blind, devilish despair! And all for an empty-headed little thing who could have been found in her dozens behind twenty shop counters not a quarter of a mile away! What on earth, what on, or under, or above the earth, could this brooding, clever, gigantic, laughed-at creature want with such a doll? Why could he not leave her in her proper place--cheek by cheek with the little bounder of her choice in that smelly, unlighted old ledger-room? The man must be blind, or a fool. Then a sort of lethargy took Louie. Suddenly she cared for nothing. Let the fancy-stationer's cub take his risks; let the other eat his heart out if he would; it was no business of hers. Nor was that absurd table of questions before her any business of hers. Kitty Windus might answer that sort of thing; Mackie might answer it; but the Scarisbricks were not Kittys, with her "part-independency," not Mackies, to stuff their heads and ink their fingers like this for their "permanencies." She did not know now why she had ever come to the place, and she wanted no more of it. What she was going to do she did not know. She did know, however, that she was not going to answer that silly paper. So, by-and-by, she allowed the paper to be collected again, as blank as when it had been placed before her. She came upon the perverse Mr. Jeffries once more before she left. He almost ran her down bodily as they met in the doorway of the typewriting-room. But this time she did not look at his face. With a swift intaking of her breath she fell back to save herself. She did not hear whether he apologised or not; in one moment, without premeditation, her whole being had become constrained to a new, protective, instinctive attitude. Slowly and thoughtfully she left the School. She alone of the students was unsurprised to hear, four or five days later, that Mr. Jeffries, who had passed with distinction in the first part of his paper, had, like herself, failed in the second part. §_b_ For the examination the rooms had been cut up with screens; for the breaking-up social they were cleared of everything that could be stowed away into dark corners. Never was such a hoisting and calling as those with which the hired piano was got up the three flights of stairs. Most of it came from Mr. Mackie, turned for the nonce into a shabash-wallah.