"Good afternoon, Miss Pym. I am Teresa Desterro. I am so sorry that I missed your lecture last night. I had a class in Larborough." Desterro took off her hat with a leisurely and studied grace, and dropped to the grass by Lucy's side in one continuous smooth movement. Everything about her was smooth and fluid: her voice, her drawling speech, her body, her movements, her dark hair, her honey-brown eyes.
"A class?"
"A dancing class; for shop girls. So earnest; so precise; so very bad. They will give me a box of chocolates next week because it is the last class of the season, and because they like me, and because it is after all the custom; and I shall feel like a crook. It is false pretences. No one could teach them to dance."
"I expect they enjoy themselves. Is it usual? I mean, for students to take outside classes?"
"But we all do, of course. That is how we get practice. At schools, and convents, and clubs, and that sort of thing. You do not care for cricket?"
Lucy, rousing herself to this swift change of subject, explained that cricket was only possible to her in the company of a bag of cherries. "How is it that you don't play?"
"I don't play any games. To run about after a little ball is supremely ridiculous. I came here for the dancing. It is a very good dancing college."
But surely, Lucy said, there were ballet schools in London of an infinitely higher standard than anything obtainable at a college of physical training.
"Oh, for that one has to begin young, and to have a metier. Me, I have no metier, only a liking."
"And will you teach, then, when you go back to-Brazil, is it?"