“You know how Benji loves to have you home, Doda. Benji simply lives for you. I’ve never known a brother so devoted. You ought to think of Benji sometimes, Doda.” “Well, I can’t be always thinking of Benji. I’m surely entitled to be with my own friends sometimes. I don’t ask Benji to be devoted to me.” She’s strangely given to expressions like that: “I didn’t ask for”--whatever circumstance or obligation it might be that was irksome to her. “Not traditions--precedents!” The watchword of the school was strangely to be traced in her attitude, still in her childish years, towards a hundred commonplaces of the daily life. She was always curiously older than her years. She seemed to have a natural bent away from traditionally childish things and towards attractions not associated with childhood. She did excellently well at the school. She was, her reports said, uncommonly quick and vivid at her lessons. She was always in a form above her years. Her friends, while she was smallish, were always the elder girls, and the elder girls gave her welcome place among them. “Perhaps a shade precocious,” wrote the lady principal in one of the laconic, penetrating sentences with which, above her signature, each girl’s report was terminated: and, in a later term, “Has ‘Forward!’ for her banner, but should remember ‘not too fast’.” “Gripes! I know what she’s referring to,” said Doda, seeing it, and laughed, obviously flattered. “Your expressions, Doda!” “Huggo uses it.” “They’re wretched even in Huggo. But Huggo’s a boy. You’re a girl.” “Well, mother, I didn’t ask to be a girl.” “Doda, that’s merely silly.” “A lot of us say it, that’s all I know.” “Then, darling, a lot of you are silly.” “Oh, I shall be glad when next week I go to the Fergussons. It is dull.” Look, there she is. She’s sixteen. She’s beautiful. She’s pretty as a picture, and she knows she is. She’s grown out of the rather early fullness of figure that had been hers. She’s slim and tall and straight and supple and slender as a willow wand. If she had her hair up and her skirts lengthened (skirts then were only starting on their diminution to the knees), she’d pass for twenty anywhere, and a twenty singularly attractive, curiously self-possessed, strikingly suggestive in her pale and beautiful countenance, and in an alternating sleepiness and glinting in her eyes; strikingly suggestive of, well, strikingly suggestive according to the predilictions and the principles of the beholder.