and
smudging impressionistic portraits of her comrades on spare pages of
essay paper. Worse than this, her imagination was apt to absolutely run
away with her. Miss Pratt one day, lecturing on English Literature, gave
a critical survey of Keats's poems. "Isabella and the Pot of Basil"
fascinated Lesbia instantly, and her brain danced off to create a
picture of the scene. She visualized the exact drooping pose of
Isabella, the hang of her dark hair, the drapery of her rich dress, the
reflection of sunlight on the brass pot, the peep of mediaeval landscape
seen between curtains in the background, the tear that must glitter on
Isabella's long lashes, her look of hopeless despair, and the rich
scheme of colour that must run through the whole picture.

"Quote the terms in which the _Edinburgh Review_ summed up its criticism
of 'Endymion'?" asked Miss Pratt.

Lesbia started. She had been so busy fixing details of her proposed
picture of Isabella that all further particulars of the lecture had
passed unheard. She had not the ghost of a notion what the _Edinburgh
Review_ had said about "Endymion", except a shadowy impression that they
had slated it.

"They--they--didn't like it," she stammered lamely.

The form giggled faintly. Miss Pratt cleared her throat in the ominous
manner that always preluded trouble.

"I never thought you conspicuously bright, Lesbia Ferrars," she remarked
scathingly; "but you're really outdoing yourself to-day. The criticism
of the _Edinburgh Review_ on Keats's poem would equally well describe
your attitude of mind. Yes, Carrie, you may give it," nodding to another
quarter of the room.

"Calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy," quoted Carrie.

At which the faint giggle swelled again, but subsided at a glance from
the teacher.

Lesbia sat up straight, banishing Isabella and all possible shapes of
basil pots from her brain, and pinched her finger to try and keep
concentration on the lesson, though the portrait of Keats himself, with
his poetic blue eyes and ruddy chestnut curls, danced sometimes before
her like an aesthetic will o' the wisp to lead her astray.

"I'm an artistic peg in a scholastic hole," she said to herself, rather
pleased with her own simile.

Miss Pratt, however, took no notice of the shapes of pegs or of holes.
She was there for the purpose of giving a literature lesson, out of
which she meant her girls to get the utmost possible profit. She had no
patience with