accents. 'She has application.' Dr. Rylance nodded assentingly. 'She has
a charming deportment. I know of no girl in the school more thoroughly
ladylike. I have never seen her with a collar put on crookedly, or with
rough hair. She is a pattern to many of my girls.'

'That is all gratifying to my pride as a father; but I hope she has made
progress in her studies.'

Miss Pew coughed gently behind a mittened hand.

'She has not made quite so great an advance as I should have wished. She
has talent, no doubt; but it is hardly of a kind that comes into play
among other girls. In after-life, perhaps, there may be development. I am
sorry to say she is not in our roll-call of honour to-day. She has won no
prize.'

'Perhaps she may have hardly thought it worth her while to compete,' said
Dr. Rylance, hurt in his own individual pride by the idea that his
daughter had missed distinction, just as he would have been hurt if
anybody had called one of his pictures a copy, or made light of his blue
china. 'With the Rylances it has always been Caesar or nothing.'

'I regret to say that my three most important prizes have been won by a
young woman whom I cannot esteem,' said Miss Pew, bristling in her
panoply of apple-green, at the thought of Ida Palliser's insolence. 'I
hope I shall ever be just, at whatever sacrifice of personal feeling. I
shall to-day bestow the first prize for modern languages, for music, and
for English history and literature, upon a young person of whose moral
character I have a very low opinion.'