"Do they mind an audience?" Lucy asked as they sat down.
"They are very used to one. Hardly a day goes by without a visitor of some kind."
"What is under the gallery? What is it they watch all the time?"
"Themselves," said Henrietta succinctly. "The whole wall below the gallery is one long mirror."
Lucy admired the impersonal interest on the faces of the students as they watched their reflected performances. To be able to view one's physical entity with such critical detachment was surely no bad thing.
"It is one of the griefs of my life," the dutch-doll Gage was saying, looking at her up-stretched arms, "that my arms have that kink at the elbow."
"If you listened to that Friday-friend and used your will-power, you'd have them straight by now," Stewart observed, not pausing in her own contortions.
"Probably bent back the other way," Beau Nash mocked, from a doubled-up position at the rib-stalls.
Lucy deduced that a Friday-friend was the «interest» lecturer who appeared on Friday evenings; and wondered idly whether that particular one had called his subject «faith» or «mind-over-matter»; was it Lourdes or was it Coue?
Hasselt, the South African with the flat Primitive face, was clutching Innes's ankles in the air while Innes stood on her hands. " Reeeee -ly on thee a rrrr ms, Mees Innes," Hasselt was saying, in a would-be Swedish accent that was evidently a quotation from Froken; and Innes laughed and collapsed. Looking at them, flushed and smiling (this, she thought, is the first time I have seen Mary Innes smile) Lucy felt again how out-of-place these two faces were. Hasselt's belonged above a Madonna-blue robe, with a tiny landscape of hills and castles and roads somewhere at her left ear. And Innes's to a portrait on some ancestral staircase-seventeenth century, perhaps? No, too gay, too adaptable, too arched-of-eye-brow. Sixteenth century, rather. Withdrawn, uncompromising, unforgiving; the-stake-or-nothing.