ing
vitality.

As is usual on an opening day, every girl was at her best and brightest,
decked in a new blouse, with pigtails fastened by crisp new ribbons, and
good resolutions wound up to fever point. To find a new French mistress
in the shape of a pretty well-dressed girl, who was English at one
moment, and at the next even Frenchier than Mademoiselle, was an
unexpected joy, and Claire found the battery of admiring young eyes an
embarrassing if stimulating experience.

Following Miss Farnborough's advice, she spent the first day's lessons
in questioning the different classes as to their past work, and so
turned the hour into an impromptu conversation class. The ugly English
accents made her wince, and she winced a second time as she realised the
unpleasant fact that just as her pupils would have to prepare for her,
so would she be obliged to prepare for them! Forgotten rules of grammar
must be looked up and memorised, for French was so much her mother
tongue that she would find it difficult to explain distinctions which
came as a matter of course. That meant more work at night, more
infringement of holiday hours.

The girls themselves were for the most part agreeable and well-mannered.
The majority were the daughters of professional men, and of gentle-
folks of limited means; but there was also a sprinkling of the daughters
of better-class artisans, who paid High School fees at a cost of much
self-denial in order to train their girls for teachers' posts in the
future. Here and there an awkward, badly-dressed child was plainly of a
still lower class. These were the free "places"--clever children who
had obtained scholarships from primary schools, and were undergoing the
ordeal of being snubbed by their new school-mates as a consequence of
their success.

From the teacher's point of view these clever children were a welcome
stimulus, but class feeling is still too strong in England to make them
acceptable to their companions.

At lunch-time the fifteen mistresses assembled in the Staff-Room, a dull
apartment far too small for the purpose, a common fault in High Schools,
where the different governing bodies are apt to spare no expense in
providing for the comfort of the scholar, but grudge the slightest
expenditure for the benefit of those who teach.

Fifteen mistresses sat round the table eating roast lamb and boiled
cabbage, followed by rhubarb pie and rice pudding, and Claire, looking
from one to the ot