That happened in the Christmas holidays, in January. In February was Doda’s eleventh birthday. The child had friends rather older than herself, neighbours, who for a year had been boarders at a school in Surrey. She was desperately eager to join them there and it was a promise from Rosalie that she should go when she was twelve, earlier if she were good. On this eleventh birthday, which brought birthday letters from the neighbours at the school and thus again brought up the subject, “Oh, haven’t I been good?” cried Doda at the birthday breakfast. “Oh, do let me go next term, mother. Father, do say I may.” Her eagerness for school had been much fostered by Huggo’s holiday stories of school life; and Huggo, as Doda now adduced, was leaving his preparatory and starting at Tidborough next term; couldn’t she, oh, couldn’t she make also her start then? Harry said, “O grown-up woman of enormous years, think of your sorrowing parents. How will you like to leave your weeping mother, Doda? How will you like to leave your heart-broken old father?” “Oh, I’d love to!” cried Doda. The ingenuousness of it made her parents laugh. “She’ll have her way, won’t she?” said Harry, when Doda, conscious, by that laugh, of tolerance, had danced out of the room. “I think she’d better,” said Rosalie. The school was very well known to Rosalie. It was exclusive and expensive; was limited to seventy girls, of whom twenty, under the age of thirteen, were received in the adapted Dower House of the ancient estate which was its home; and the last word in modernity was, in every point of administration, its first word. It had been established only eight years. The motto of its founders and of its lady principal was “Not traditions--precedents!” The subject came up again between Rosalie and Harry that evening and it was decided that Doda should be placed there after the next holidays, at the opening of the summer term. Harry declared himself, “in my bones” as he expressed it, against boarding schools for girls, “But that’s my old fogeyism,” said he. “It’s the modern idea that girls should have the same training and the same chances in life as their brothers, and there’s no getting away from the right of it.” Rosalie said in a low voice, “To what end?” He did not hear her. She had got out from the accumulation of papers of her business life prospectuses and booklets of the school and he was amusedly browsing over the refinements and advantages therein, not by traditions but by precedents, set forth. “Mice and Mumps, Rosalie,” said he, “they not only do riding as a regular thing but ‘parents are permitted, if they wish, to stable a pupil’s own pony (see page 26).’ Oh, thanks, thanks! ‘Mr. Harry Occleve, barrister-at-law, availing himself of your gracious permission on page twenty-six, is sending down for his daughter a coach and four with ‘ostlers, grooms, coachmen, and outriders complete.’ Ha!” She was just watching him.