Everybody seemed to welcome this particular Easter, even "the blessed Damozel", who, despite her poetic appearance, was the form's champion worker. The hard grind had perhaps accentuated her resemblance to Rossetti's heroine, for a slight paleness etherealized her, the intellectual concentration made her great grey eyes shine as the chief feature in her face, and her hair, which fortunately never seemed to darken, was still "yellow like ripe corn". Regina was really growing very pretty, and though she had not yet dropped her jerky angular manner, she was much less gauche than she had been a year ago, and promised to develop into an interesting personality.
"She's the sort of girl who may possibly do anything after she leaves school," commented Calla one day, when the girls were discussing absent members.
"Yes. With those brains it's just what she takes it into her head to concentrate on," agreed Laura. "She might make a hit on the stage."
"No, no! Not with those queer manners."
"But don't you see she's always posing? It's the very effort to be something outside herself that makes her so odd and peculiar. She's feeling after an ideal, and if she ever strikes it she'll be a huge success."
"If in the meantime she doesn't marry a curate," put in Kathleen.
"A curate, child?"
"Yes; Regina's exactly the sort of girl who would!"
"I prophesy she'll go to college, take a tremendous good degree—wrangler or double first or something of that sort—and be head of a high school."
"No, she won't. I know it seems her ordinary course, but she's not an ordinary girl. She'll wangle something different and unusual. She ought to marry a member of Parliament, not a curate—though I believe if she did she'd soon make him a bishop—I could just imagine her, very handsomely dressed, at a Mansion House ball, dancing with a foreign ambassador. Cave! Here she comes—with the air of a princess. Who's she copying at present I wonder?"