ervous when she
stares at me with those big eyes. I feel as if she were trying to
hypnotize me? Do you believe in hypnotism? It's rather creepy."

"If she'd mesmerize me to know my prep I'd be grateful to her. Don't be
an idiot, Ermie."

"She makes _me_ think of 'The Blessed Damozel'," piped Carrie
obtrusively.

"The Blessed _who_?"

"Oh, you evidently don't know your Dante Gabriel Rossetti!"

"I don't know my Dante anybody. Who was she, or he, whichever it is?"

"It's a piece of poetry, of course."

"There's no 'of course' about it."

"Well it is at any rate."

"Go on, Carrie, and spout. You're dying to give it to us, I can see,"
urged Marjorie.

Carrie, who was in the elocution class and loved reciting, did not wait
to be asked twice. Secure of an even moderately willing audience she
began:

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL

The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.

"Now it _is_ like her, isn't it?" she inquired at the end of the second
stanza. "Shall I say you any more?"

"No, thanks" (some of the girls were moving hastily away). "That's quite
enough. Yes, perhaps it is like Regina, if you look quite at the
romantic side of her. Her hair is 'yellow like ripe corn', and her eyes,
of course, are the main part about her. All the same, she's too
substantial somehow for me to imagine her leaning out over any gold bar
of Heaven. I'd be afraid she'd break it. She must weigh more than I do,
and I'm eight stone--nearly! I was weighed at the station yesterday on
the automatic machine."

"Well, if you're going to reckon attraction by lack of weight, I suppose
you'd admire a living skeleton."

"Not at all, but I can't quite reconcile gold bars of Heaven with
twenty-six inches round the waist."

"Some people haven't the soul to appreciate poetry properly."

"That's true," chirped Ermie unabashed. "I dare say the Miss Miltons
voted 'that poem of Dad's' awful slow. It was certainly 'Paradise Lost'
to them to have to sit and write at his dictation when they probably
wanted to be out picking blackberries or feeding the hens. I've al