Clarissa followed her to the shade of a tree at the edge of the tennis ground, and there Polly read the note to her:
“My dear Miss Porson,—May I see you Friday or Saturday between nine and eleven o’clock.”
And the signature was that of the Dean.
“Yes,” said Polly reminiscently, “it’s true that I’ve been walking hatless to the Square,—like several others I could mention,” and she glanced significantly toward Clarissa.
“But you ought to know,” said Elspeth Gray, who had joined them, “that that isn’t the thing in a conventional place like Cambridge.”
“Yes, but going without a hat seems to be in the direction of the plain living and high thinking toward which we’re always encouraged.”
“But what did the Dean say to you, Polly? I cannot imagine her being unduly severe.”
“She wasn’t severe. She couldn’t be. I left her feeling not that I had been reproved, but simply advised.”
“Was nothing said about sitting on the stairs? I saw you on the landing yesterday, and some of our instructors complain bitterly of this. They say that it is too much like the behavior of schoolgirls, and—”
“As long as they express their feelings merely in words,” responded Clarissa, “I can bear it. I wish that they would bestow our marks upon us in words. A postal card is so much harder to bear when it is stamped officially, ‘French Department. Your mark in French 11 is C.’ The big, blue ‘C’ that they make of such an enormous size, sprawled across the card.”