"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?"
"Oh, no; I shall get married," said Miss Desterro simply. "I came to England because I had an unhappy love affair. He was r-r-ravishing, but qu-ite unsuitable. So I came to England to get over it."
"Is your mother English, perhaps?"
"No, my mother is French. My grandmother is English. I adore the English. Up to here"-she lifted a graceful hand, wrist properly leading, and laid it edge-wise across her neck-"they are full of romance, and from there up, plain horse sense. I went to my grandmother, and I cried all over her best silk chairs, and I said "What shall I do? What shall I do?" About my lover, you understand. And she said: "You can blow your nose and get out of the country." So I said I would go to Paris and live in a garret and paint pictures of an eye and a seashell sitting on a plate. But she said: "You will not. You will go to England and sweat a bit." So, as I always listen to my grandmother, and since I like dancing and am very good at it, I came here. To Leys. They looked a little sideways on me at first when I said I wanted just to dance-"
This is what Lucy had been wondering. How did this charming «nut» find a welcome in this earnest English college, this starting-place of careers?
"— but one of the students had broken down in the middle of her training-they often do, and do you wonder? — and that left a vacant place in the scheme, which was not so nice, so they said: 'Oh, well, let this crazy woman from Brazil have Kenyon's room and allow her to come to the classes. It will not do any harm and it will keep the books straight. "
"So you began as a Senior?"
"For dancing, yes. I was already a dancer, you understand. But I took Anatomy with the Juniors. I find bones interesting. And to other lectures I went as I pleased. I have listened to all subjects. All but plumbing. I find plumbing indecent."
Miss Pym took «plumbing» to be Hygiene. "And have you enjoyed it all?"
"It has been a li-beral education. They are very naive, the English girls. They are like little boys of nine." Noticing the unbelieving smile on Miss Pym's face: there was nothing naive about Beau Nash. "Or little girls of eleven. They have 'raves. You know what a 'rave' is?" Miss Pym nodded. "They swoon if Madame Lefevre says a kind word to them. I swoon, too, but it is from surprise. They save up their money to buy flowers for Froken, who thinks of nothing but a Naval Officer in Sweden."
"How do you know that?" asked Lucy, surprised.
"He is on her table. In her room. His photograph, I mean. And she is Continental. She does not have 'raves. "
"The Germans do," Lucy pointed out. "They are famous for it."
"An ill-balanced people," said Desterro, dismissing the Teutonic race. "The Swedes are not like that."
"All the same, I expect she likes the little offerings of flowers."
"She does not, of course, throw them out of the window. But I notice she likes better the ones who do not bring her offerings."
"Oh? There are some who do not have 'raves, then?"
"Oh, yes. A few. The Scots, for instance. We have two." She might have been talking of rabbits. "They are too busy quarrelling to have any spare emotions."
"Quarrelling? But I thought the Scots stuck together the world over."
"Not if they belong to different winds."
"Winds?"
"It is a matter of climate. We see it very much in Brazil. A wind that goes 'a-a-a-ah'" [she opened her red mouth and expelled a soft insinuating breath] "makes one kind of person. But a wind that goes 's-s-s-s-ss'" [she shot the breath viciously out through her teeth] "makes another person altogether. In Brazil it is altitude, in Scotland it is West Coast and East Coast. I observed it in the Easter holidays, and so understood about the Scots. Campbell has a wind that goes 'a-a-a-ah, and so she is lazy, and tells lies, and has much charm that is all of it quite synthetic. Stewart has a wind that goes 's-s-s-s-ss, so she is honest, and hardworking, and has a formidable conscience."
Miss Pym laughed. "According to you, the east coast of Scotland must be populated entirely by saints."
"There is also some personal reason for the quarrel, I understand. Something about abused hospitality."
"You mean that one went home with the other for holidays and- misbehaved?" Visions of vamped lovers, stolen spoons, and cigarette burns on the furniture, ran through Lucy's too vivid imagination.
"Oh, no. It happened more than two hundred years ago. In the deep snow, and there was a massacre." Desterro did full justice to the word "massacre."
At this Lucy really laughed. To think that the Campbells were still engaged in living down Glencoe! A narrow-minded race, the Celts.
She sat so long considering the Celts that The Nut Tart turned to look up at her. "Have you come to use us as specimens, Miss Pym?"
Lucy explained that she and Miss Hodge were old friends and that her visit was a holiday one. "In any case," she said, kindly, "I doubt whether as a specimen a Physical Training Student is likely to be psychologically interesting."
"No? Why?"
"Oh, too normal and too nice. Too much of a type."
A faint amusement crossed Desterro's face; the first expression it had shown so far. Unexpectedly, this stung Lucy; as if she too had been found guilty of being naive.
"You don't agree?"
"I am trying to think of someone-some Senior-who is normal. It is not easy."
"Oh, come!"
"You know how they live here. How they work. It would be difficult to go through their years of training here and be quite normal in their last term."
"Do you suggest that Miss Nash is not normal?"
"Oh, Beau. She is a strong-minded creature, and so has suffered less, perhaps. But would you call her friendship for Innes quite normal? Nice, of course," Desterro added hastily, "quite irreproachable. But normal, no. That David and Jonathan relationship. It is a very happy one, no doubt, but it"-Desterro waved her arm to summon an appropriate word — "it excludes so much. The Disciples are the same, only there are four of them."