So that was how it began. Fate, at their first meeting, seemed to fling Regina into her very lap. You cannot share a desk with anybody without contracting a certain amount of intimacy, the mere fact of bending your heads together to store your books and pencils in the same receptacle promotes confidence. By the end of the third day Lesbia knew the number of Regina's brothers and sisters and what colour her new costume was going to be, and Regina had heard the whole story of how Lesbia nearly went to Canada and didn't. There was not very much reserve about Lesbia. If she took a fancy to anybody her heart blossomed like a mango in an Indian conjurer's trick, and she was ready to impart any number of secrets. To certain impulsive temperaments a new friendship is a great opportunity. It means a totally fresh start with somebody who will not be influenced by old impressions, but will take you at your present valuation, someone to whom you can pour out your own version of your biography unbiased by other people's opinions, somebody to whom all your old stories and jokes will be new, and to whom even your last year's hat will appear quite fresh and worthy of admiration.
Regina was no ordinary girl. That was apparent the moment she had walked into Va. Her face was too strongly cut for mere prettiness, but her great grey eyes seemed to hold whole past lifetimes of thought in them. In manner she was very abrupt. She snapped out her remarks in short jerks, as if she were firing them from a gun. She moved with the self-consciousness often noticed in girls of sixteen. The whole of her atmosphere was intensely "mental". Astrologers would have placed Mercury and Jupiter for her birth signs. Her brains were so big that she almost seemed intellectual against her will. She did not want to pose as clever, and curiously enough seemed to covet most all the specially feminine characteristics which she rather conspicuously lacked. She admired Lesbia, much as a boy would, for her pretty hair, her dainty movements, and the general Celtic glamour that hung about her; she behaved, indeed, more like a youth in love than an ordinary schoolgirl chum. Her large soulful eyes would gaze at her idol during classes as if she were composing sonnets, and she haunted her round the school till the girls christened her "Lesbia's shadow".
"She's queer, of course, but in a way she's rather a sport," declared Kathleen, discussing the new-comer in the cloakroom.
"Yes, she's certainly queer. She never does anything in the least like anybody else," agreed Ermie Hall. "She makes me quite nervous 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."