“Oh, Darsie Garnett, how mean of you, when I feed you with my best Chelsea buns, to land me in this time-honoured discussion! I’m an only child, and my parents have been perfect bricks in giving me my wish and sparing me for three whole years! The least I can do is to go home and do a turn for them. I fail to see where the waste comes in!”
“All you have learned—all you have studied—all you have read—”
“Just so! I hope it will make me a more interesting companion for them. And for myself! I’ve got to live with myself all the days of my life, remember, and I do not wish to be bored!”
“You have such power, such capacity! You might do some work for the world!”
“I intend to. What’s the world made up of, after all, but a number of separate homes? As a matter of ordinary common sense isn’t it best to work in one’s own home, rather than in a strange one?”
Margaret threw out her hands with a pretty appealing gesture, and her companions stared at her in silence, apparently too nonplussed to reply. Before they had time to rally to the attack, however, a startling interruption had occurred.
With a suddenness and violence which made the cocoa-drinkers jump in their seats the door burst open, and the figure of a girl in evening dress precipitated herself into their midst. Her light skirt was thrown over her shoulders, revealing an abbreviated white petticoat; her eyes were fixed with a deadly determination; regardless of the occupants of the room or of the articles of furniture scattered here and there, she flew at lightning speed to the window, closed it with a resounding bang, leaped like a cat at the ventilator overhead, banged that also, and with one bound was out of the room, the door making a third bang in her wake.
Darsie gasped in dismay. She herself had been transfixed with astonishment, but her companions had displayed a marvellous self-possession. Margaret had wrapped her arms round the cocoa-table to protect it from upset, another girl had steadied the screen, a third had obligingly lifted her chair out of the way; but no sign of alarm or curiosity showed upon their faces, which fact did but heighten the mystery of the situation.
“Is she—is she mad?”
The second-year girls laughed in chorus. From afar could be heard a succession of bang, bang, bangs, as if in every study in the house the same performance was being enacted. Margaret nodded at the Fresher with kindly reassurance.