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 æsthetic 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 what she considered "slacking", and she kept a keen eye on Lesbia for the rest of the hour, asking her questions whenever she perceived any signs of straying attention.
Lesbia sketched her picture during geometry on the back page of her exercise book, but it was a scratchy performance and quite unworthy of her high ideals. She covered it hastily lest the mistress should see it.
"If they'd only let us choose our own work at the High School I'd vote for a life-class," she sighed, taking up her compasses and trying to focus her wandering mind on circles and angles and letters of the alphabet, instead of the outlines of the human form divine.
It was on the very next Saturday that Kitty, craving for the country, and finding for once she had no particularly pressing engagement in town, suggested a cycling excursion. She wanted her sister to go with her, but Kingfield held superior attractions for Joan, who suggested Lesbia as a substitute and promised to lend her her bicycle. It was all arranged at the breakfast-table, and the two girls then and there cut sandwiches, fetched the machines, oiled them, pumped tyres, strapped on cycle-baskets, and started forth before ten o'clock. They rode first through the suburbs, where foliage was yet unspoilt with dust from motors, and the gardens were making a brave show of lilac, laburnum, and pink hawthorn. Then by degrees the houses grew fewer, the kerbstones disappeared, and the footpaths gave way to grassy borders; there were unclipped hedges instead of ornamental railings, and fields, and woods, and streams on the other side of them. Bird-life was at its zenith; larks, so high as to be almost invisible, poured out torrents of rapture; every apple tree seemed to have a blackbird soloist on a topmost bough; wrens, linnets, and hedge-warblers fluttered and twittered among low bushes, and flocks of jackdaws and rooks rose from the fields in whirling flights. With one accord the girls rode fast. There was an exaltation in free-wheeling down the hills, flying through the air like birds. It almost gave them the sensation of wings. The spell of spring was upon them, that curious thrill that comes to us as we escape out of the circles of civilization and visit Mother Nature at her busiest season, when every inch of her domain is a-throb with life. It was pretty country in the neighbourhood of Kingfield, an undulating landscape with large trees and lush meadows, and a slow river with banks of reeds and iris. The villages had timbered cottages with thatched roofs and flowery gardens, old grey church towers showed among groups of leafy elms, and picturesque farm buildings and straw-stacks stood back from the road at the ends of by-lanes.