But it was at Lundeen School that I saw Laura di san Marzano for the third and last time.
It was the most inappropriate setting imaginable.
She was left there by mama, in mid-term, because a continental doctor had declared that she needed bracing air and companionship of her own age, and also—this I learnt later, quite incidentally, from Laura herself—because mama and a cher ami had suddenly planned a visit to Monte Carlo for the express purpose of visiting the Casino, to which Laura, being under twenty-one, could not have been admitted.
Laura, as the hotel child, had been pathetic, but her dignity had been safeguarded, if not actually enhanced, by the kaleidescopic background of her surroundings.
At school, she was pitiful—and out of place. The girls, without ill nature, despised her from the first.
She arrived amongst them in the short, fanciful, ultra-picturesque silk frocks and infantile bows of hair ribbon that I had seen her wear abroad. Those unimaginative, untravelled English schoolgirls had seen no one like her before, and what they did not know, by experience or by tradition, they distrusted and disliked.
Lundeen School made demands upon the pupils’ physiques, upon their powers of conformity, and upon each one’s capacity for assimilating wholesale a universally applied system.
Laura di san Marzano had no chance at all.
The child who “never forgot people” could not remember her multiplication table, and although she spoke perfectly at least three languages besides English, she had never learnt syntax, nor read a line of any history. She had seen the Guitrys play in Paris—(and from her crisp appreciations and criticisms I deduced that no finest nuance of their art had been lost upon her)—but she had memorized no standard selections from the poets. And she did not know how to learn.
No one, not even the head mistress, was very much disturbed by Laura’s educational deficiencies, because it was so evident from the first that her stay amongst us would only be a very temporary affair.