n had no difficulty in understanding. She pounced
upon her with lightning swiftness.

"Ah, you think you'll get married, and escape that way! We all do when
we're new, and pretty, and ignorant of the life. But it's fifty to one,
my dear, that you _won't_? You won't meet many men, for one thing; and
if you do, they don't like school-mistresses."

"Doesn't that depend a good deal on the kind of school-mistress?"

"Absolutely; but after a few years we are all more or less alike. We
don't _begin_ by being dowdy and angular, and dogmatic and prudish; we
begin by being pretty and cheerful like you. I used to change my blouse
every evening, and put on silk stockings."

"Don't you now?"

"I do _not_! Why should I, to sit over a lodging-house table correcting
exercises till ten o'clock? It's not worth the trouble. Besides, I'm
too tired, and it wears out another blouse."

Claire's attention was diverted from clothes by the shock of the
reference to evening work. She had looked forward to coming home to
read an interesting book, or be lazy in whatever fashion appealed to her
most, and the corrections of exercises seemed of all things the most
dull.

"Shall I have evening work, too?" she inquired blankly, and Miss Rhodes
laughed with brutal enjoyment.

"Rather! French compositions on the attributes of a true woman, or,
`How did you spend your summer holiday?' with all the tenses wrong, and
the idioms translated word for word. And every essay a practical
repetition of the one before. It's not once in a blue moon that one
comes across a girl with any originality of thought. Oh, yes! that's
the way we shall spend five evenings a week. You will sit at that side
of the table, I will sit at this, and we'll correct and yawn, and yawn
and correct, and drink a cup of cocoa and go to bed at ten. Lively,
isn't it?"

"Awful! I never thought of homework. But if Saturday is a whole
holiday there will still be one night off. I shall make a point of
doing something exciting every Saturday evening."

"Exciting things cost money, and, as a rule, when you have paid up the
various extras, there's no money to spare. I stay in bed till ten
o'clock on Saturday, and then get up and wash blouses, and do my
mending, and have a nap after lunch, and if it's summer, go and sit on a
penny chair in the park, or take a walk over Hampstead Heath. In the
evening I read a novel and have a hot bath. Once in a blue moon I have
an ex