and the visit to Godmother seemed to bring it to a head.

About this time, too, a couple of pieces of good fortune came her way.

The first: she was privileged to be third in the friendship between
Inez and Bertha--a favour of which she availed herself eagerly, though
the three were as different from one another as three little girls
could be. Bertha was a good-natured romp, hard-fisted, thick of leg,
and of a plodding but ineffectual industry. Inez, on the other hand,
was so pretty that Laura never tired of looking at her: she had a pale
skin, hazel eyes, brown hair with a yellow light in it, and a Greek
nose. Her mouth was very small; her nostrils were mere tiny slits; and
so lazy was she that she seldom more than half opened her eyes. Both
girls were well over fourteen, and very fully developed: compared with
them, Laura was like nothing so much as a skinny young colt.

She was so grateful to them for tolerating her that she never took up a
stand of real equality with them: proud and sensitive, she was always
ready to draw back and admit their prior rights to each other; hence
the friendship did not advance to intimacy. But such as it was, it was
very comforting; she no longer needed to sit alone in recess; she could
link arms and walk the garden with complacency; and many were the
supercilious glances she now threw at Maria Morell and that clique; for
her new friends belonged socially to the best set in the school.

In another way, too, their company made things easier for her: neither
of them aimed high; and both were well content with the lowly places
they occupied in the class. And so Laura, who was still, in her young
confusion, unequal to discovering what was wanted of her, grew
comforted by the presence and support of her friends, and unmindful of
higher opinion; and Miss Chapman, in supervising evening lessons,
remarked with genuine regret that little Laura was growing perky and
lazy.

Her second piece of good luck was of quite a different nature.

Miss Hicks, the visiting governess for geography, had a gift for saying
biting things that really bit. She bore Inez a peculiar grudge; for she
believed that certain faculties slumbered behind the Grecian profile,
and that only the girl's ingrained sloth prevented them.

One day she lost patience with this sluggish pupil.

"I'll tell you what it is, Inez," she said; "you're blessed with a real
woman's brain: vague, slippery, inexact, interested only in the