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While on this subject let me add that it was characteristic of her relationship with her former pupils that they called her Jollypot to her face, and that she had never taken the trouble to find out why; that the great adventure of her life had been her conversion to Catholicism—a Catholicism, however, which retained a tinge of Anglicanism: to wit, a great deal of vague enthusiasm for “dear, lovely St. Francis of Assisi,” combined with a neglect of the crude and truly Catholic cult of that most potent of “medicine-men”—St. Anthony of Padua; and that taste for Dante studies so characteristic of middle-aged Anglican spinsters. Indeed, she was remarkably indiscriminating in her tastes, and loved equally Shakespeare, Dante, Mrs. Browning, the Psalms, Anne Thackeray, and W. J. Locke; but from time to time she surprised one by the poetry and truth of her observations.

The Doña, holding in mid-air a finger biscuit soaked in chocolate, smiled and blinked a welcome; but her eyes flashed to her brain the irritated message, “If only the jumper were purple, or even green! And those beads—does she sleep in them?”