got to take the faces our mothers
gave us. Haven't you heard of a beautiful _plain_ person? I know several
who haven't a single decent feature, and yet somehow they're lovely in
spite of it all. Some of the most fascinating women in the world have
been plain--George Sand hadn't an atom of beauty, and yet she enthralled
two such geniuses as Chopin and Alfred de Musset."

"I'll go in for fascination, then," rattled on Patsie. "We can't all be
in the same style. Claudia shall do the Venus business, and I'll be a
what-do-you-call-it? Siren?"

"Oh, no! Sirens were wretches!"

"Why, I thought they were only a sort of mermaid! Well, I'll be very
modern--chic, and _spirituelle_, and witty, and _fin-de-siecle_ and all
the rest of it; and I'll have a salon like those French women used to
have, and everybody'll want to come to it, and talk about the charming
Miss Sullivan, only perhaps I'll be Mrs. Somebody by that time! I hope
so, at any rate. I don't mean to be left in the lurch, if I can help
it!"

"What shall you do if you are?" laughed Lorraine.

"Go in for a career, my dear!" said Patsie airily. "Farming, or
Parliament, or doctoring. Everything's open to us women now!"

"Well, I wouldn't try Rhythmic Dancing, at any rate! You're certainly
not cut out for that!" scoffed Effie, whose injured eye was still
smarting.

CHAPTER XI

Madame Bertier

"When the bitter north wind blows,
Very red is Baba's nose,
Very cold are Baba's toes:
When the north wind's blowing.
When the north wind's blowing!"

So sang Monica, rather out of tune, as she reached home, in a scratchy
mood, on the first afternoon of the January term, and hurried up to the
fire.

"I don't like school! I _don't_ like it!" she proclaimed to a
sympathetic audience of Rosemary, Cousin Elsie, and Richard (who was
home on leave). "I call it cruelty to send me every single day to sit
for five whole hours at a horrid little desk, stuffing my head with
things I don't want to know, and never _shall_ want to know, if I live
to be a hundred. _Why_ must I go?"

"Poor kiddie!" laughed Richard. "You've got it badly! It's a disease I
used to suffer from myself. They called it 'schoolophobia' when I was
young. They cured it with a medicine called 'spinkum-spankum', if I
remember rightly--one of those good old-fashioned remedies, don't you
know, that our grandmothers always went by."

"You're making fun of me!" chafed Monica. "And I