‘They starve you here, don’t they?’ she said, opening her locker and exhibiting her treasures one by one.
Each one had a brown-paper cover bearing in large block letters a title specially designed to propitiate the eye of Authority, should Authority happen to come round some day with a master-key. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs clothed with righteousness the impious pages of Spencer’s First Principles, and The Life of Livingstone invested Monte Cristo with a garb of sanctity. Shelley beat his luminous wings behind the broad back of Robinson Crusoe.
‘It’s a pity Miss Fry is such a frump,’ said Sheila, when they had got into their beds and Hypatia had blown the light out.
Hypatia agreed. ‘I’m awfully glad you woke up. We might never have got to know each other if you hadn’t caught me reading.’
‘I don’t expect we should,’ responded Sheila, glowing with the excitement of a new friendship.
‘I was absolutely isolated,’ Hypatia said. ‘Oh, why ever didn’t you come to St. Margaret’s before?’
Sheila laughed. ‘I would have done it if I’d known, perhaps. And yet I was sorry to leave my other school.’
‘Was it decent there?’
‘Well, they didn’t teach us much, but it was very comfortable and homelike. I’d practically grown up there. It was a day school. They didn’t worry me much. Two or three of us in the Sixth used to spend a lot of our school hours producing a school mag.’
‘Unofficial, I suppose?’