It was supposed that Miss Strickland would make short work of her, and that after the first or second music lesson Elsie’s whitened bones would be left outside the music room door. Miss Strickland herself, staring at the small bowed figure on the music stool, felt as a rose fancier might feel if asked to entertain the most noxious of the caterpillars. Here was a true type of feminine nature—a prevaricating, vacillating, cowardly little girl; and Elsie was vain too, or how would she have dared to claim the best teacher in the school for presumably the worst pupil? She so exemplified everything that Miss Strickland felt women in general were, without any of the attractions which, in the eyes of the undiscriminating, outweigh these disadvantages, that Miss Strickland felt a certain kindliness rise in her—the kindliness of a prophet who sees his worst prognostications blossom into disastrous facts. “May I ask what you think you know about music?” she shot out at the child with a twist of her determined chin. This was Miss Strickland’s usual preliminary to a campaign of slaughter, and all new pupils, even if she had a kindly feeling towards them, had to be slaughtered first. Elsie choked, looked helplessly at her limp little fingers, and stammered, “Nothing, please!” Miss Strickland did not appear in the least mollified by this collapse of confidence. “Under the circumstances,” she replied with the easy smartness of a licensed bully, “can you tell me why the teacher for the younger girls was not considered sufficiently good for you?” There was a breathless silence before Elsie, with an astonishing spasm of courage, answered, “I shouldn’t have learned anything from her, please.” “‘Couldn’t’ is no doubt what you mean,” said Miss Strickland with genial irony. “And ‘couldn’t’ will be no doubt the result of trying to learn from me. Not even the cleverest teacher can mate a good job with a bad tool. You are a very inefficient little girl. You don’t know how to sit on a music stool, or how to hold your hands. Your back is a disgrace, and your fingers are all thumbs. Let’s hear you play something. What have you got here—rubbish? Oh, I see—worse than rubbish—the usual Sonata by that poor Mozart—mercifully he is dead! “Play it, and as I am not dead, pray do not make it any louder than is strictly necessary. Keep your feet off the pedals. Pupils who don’t know how to play their notes have an idea that they can fall back on the loud pedal to drown their incompetence. That is not the proper use of pedals. They were never put into a piano to reinforce blunders.” Elsie dropped the Sonata on the floor, and in picking it up overturned the music stool. Miss Strickland longed to slap her. Like all highly strung musical organisations, she loathed a sudden noise. “Clumsy little animal!” she said under her breath. Elsie heard her and turned a dull crimson. She arranged the Sonata with trembling fingers and started off solemnly upon its well-known track.