At the close of an earnest address she had suggested that any of them willing to join the League and correspond with another young woman, forlornly in search of true friendship, would hold up a hand.
Ferlie, having arrived late from an imperfectly learnt collect, happened to be sitting at a front desk, eschewed by early arrivals as too nearly under the eye of Martha for perfect ease. Not having paid particular attention to the proceedings, but gleaning from the speaker's tense expression that something was expected of the school—possibly a penny a week to the Blind Babies' Fund—she mechanically raised her hand, wondering the while whether there would be time after the Zoo to take Cyprian to that new tea-shop where you could always get hot dough-nuts, fresh and jammy. Hers was the only hand raised. The role of "Sunlight Fairy," by letter, to a factory girl did not appeal to the Margeries and Dorises of the Upper Fourth, and the senior school members were struggling with finishing exams and wanted no extra correspondence thrust upon them in their scant leisure. Had she only known it, the dean's wife was about the fourth of a series of well-meaning women that term obsessed with schemes for benefiting England's blossoming womanhood. To put it coarsely, St. Dorothea's had "had some."
Margery was the most interested in Ferlie's future radiance as a "Fairy." The dean's wife, impressed by such single-minded strength of character, had invited her to tea and presented her with a blue card depicting a rising sun shooting an inquisitive searchlight on the face of a worried-looking young woman wending her way up a crowded thoroughfare either in quest of true friendship or a factory.
"And it's quite time you began," said Margery severely, at the termination of Ferlie's bitter harangue.
The bell for the reading of the week's marks interrupted them; following which rite a strong smell of Irish stew combined with apple pudding, in the hall, did duty for a lunch menu.
And, "I will not eat the bottom bit of my suet to-day," Margery resolved in a fierce whisper as they filed to their seats.
The conversation over the gravied onions made about four times the volume of sound as on a French day.
The Misses Mayne, one at each end of the long table, beamed indulgently. "Martha," the practical one, who was also the junior of the two sisters, confined her remarks to the state of the hockey field and reminders that stockings were to be changed immediately on the team's return.
"Mary" brightened life at her post by little reminiscences of the ways in which she had spent her Saturdays at school, "when hockey for girls was quite out of the question, my dears," and the Magic Lantern, with views of foreign countries in colours, existed still as a delirious mid-term treat.
All went contentedly until the last helping of apple pudding had been served out, and then Mary settled her glasses and allowed her kindly faded eyes to rest on one particular plate.