Miss Thorndyke's face was also crimson from the heat, but she would not
have flushed had it been the day before. She was not subject to sudden
reflexes.

"Your satire is always a bit clumsy, dear," she said sweetly. "The
odalisque is not your role at all events."

"I don't go in for roles."

And the four girls wrangled and dreamed and planned, while a city burnt
beneath them; some three hundred million dollars flamed out, lives were
ruined, exterminated, altered; and Labor sat on the hills and smiled
cynically at the tremendous impetus the earth had handed them on that
morning of April eighteenth, nineteen hundred and six.

They were too young to know or to care. When the imagination is trying its
wings it is undismayed even by a world at war.




CHAPTER V



I


That night Alexina knew that romance had surely come to her. She shared her
room with three old ladies who slept fitfully between blasts of dynamite.