“I don’t know what it means, except that I will not be Helen of Troy.”
“Then who is to be Helen of Troy?”
“Anybody who is sufficiently indifferent to take the part.”
“I want to put things quite clearly before you, Honora. You understand that, on the day when the parents of my pupils arrive here to see their children, when relations and friends cluster in the old garden, it must be a member of the school who takes part in all the tableaux and all the different events.”
“Yes, I understand that.”
“Will you have the goodness to point out to me amongst my thirty girls who else could be Helen, ‘divinely tall, and most divinely fair’?”
Honora’s dark eyes seemed to sweep her companions for a moment. Then she said, slowly:
“That is for you to discover; not for me.”
“It means this, then,” said Mrs Hazlitt, very slowly. “That because you pretend to know more than I know, we are to give up the tableaux altogether, for there is no one else in the school to take the part.”
Honora shrugged her shoulders.