"I think not," said Mrs. Clinton. "I want them to work, but I want some one who would be a pleasant companion for them too, out of lesson hours."
"Did you find it easy to make friends with your pupils at the school?" asked Lady Birkett.
"A few of them," said Miss Phipp. "The ones who wanted to get on. I used to have them in my rooms to help them. With the others I found it best to keep to work alone. I got more out of them that way. After school hours they went their own way and I went mine."
"But that is just what you couldn't do in a private family," urged Mrs. Clinton. "You wouldn't have to be always with the children, but you would be much more with them than with girls you taught in a school."
"Yes. I know that," said Miss Phipp. "Only I don't want to give you a wrong impression of myself. I would do my best to make friends with your girls, only I fancy it would rest with them more than with me. Some teachers find it quite easy to have girls hanging on to them and adoring them, and my experience is that work suffers on account of it. I wouldn't go anywhere where work wasn't the chief thing."
When she had gone out Mrs. Clinton said, "It is really very puzzling. I'm not at all sure that she wouldn't do, although she is far from being the sort of governess I had pictured."
"We shall do better," said Lady Birkett. "There are plenty more to see yet."
The next to arrive was Miss Judith Gay, twenty-three, pretty and rather shy, daughter of an admiral deceased, perfect French, good piano and singing, otherwise not up to the mark scholastically.
"If it were only a companion we wanted!" said Mrs. Clinton when she had gone out.
"The twins would love her," said Lady Birkett, "but they would twist her round their little fingers."