very good-looking bourgeois, who in his youth had been a dashing lieutenant under Napoleon I. Also the Gambert prize was not a wreath at all but an album of piano music, beautifully bound in bright red leather, which, because the Mother Superior feared arousing the vanity of the winner, was privately bestowed behind the scenes. But historic facts have no bearing on a cherished school joke of long standing. For the girls, the Gambert prize continued always to be one gigantic lark, one of those perennial farces, the indestructible quality of which so endears them to fourteen and fifteen year olds.
This year they had a new variation on their usual fooleries. Elise Fortier told them that her grown-up young lady cousin had discovered something as good as the rouge which was so strictly forbidden to them by the Sisters, that its very name was not allowed to be pronounced in school. If you bent over double and hung your head upside down, way over, thus, till it was on the same level with your knees, and held it there till you felt as though you'd burst, you'd have the loveliest color in your cheeks, just like an actress.
Of course they all wanted to look like actresses. What could be more delightful than to look like an actress!
In an instant the horrified Mademoiselle Vivier was treated to an appalling spectacle. All of her charges utterly forgetting their manners or even decency, were stooping double, their full starched skirts sticking out at acute angles behind, and to the tune of muffled shrieks of laughter were dangling and shaking their heads, like so many lunatics, their carefully dressed hair sweeping the floor. She rushed at the nearest one, Marise Allen, and forced her back to an upright position. But this did not improve things. When Marise caught a glimpse of the others, like great white mushrooms, stooping and shaking, she burst out into anything but a muffled shout of laughter, which brought them all up, one after another, to gaze and scream, and lean, convulsed and hysterical, against the walls.
It was a critical moment. The curtain was due to go up, and the girls were really out of hand. Mademoiselle Vivier could do nothing with them. They had lost control of them-
