Not far off sat a youth with receding forehead and chin, and a face like a marmot of the Alps. He kept his small eyes fixed upon the head of a drowsily pretty girl, with towzled hair of an orange tint unknown to nature but well known to art--the art of the second class coiffure. She did the reviews for a humble paper but hoped to qualify to be herself the reviewed one some day. It was clear that she would not ruin her chances by a _misalliance_ with the well-balanced scheme of retrocession observable in his profile.
Two interested young girls sat at another desk guardianed by a governess--they, at any rate, Josephine thought, possessed the first qualification for success in fiction, for they observed every one about them, and made rude remarks to each other respecting their fellow-creatures. The governess took notes by the aid of a stumpy pencil the blunt end of which she audibly touched with the tip of her tongue after every few words; and Josephine perceived that she was anaemic.
Her simple methods contrasted with the elaborate _batterie d'écriture_ of a young lady who sat at the desk next to that at which Josephine and Amber had placed themselves; for she had placed in front of her a silver-mounted case, monstrously monogrammed, with double ink-bottles, each containing something under half a pint. A rack holding half a dozen pens of varying shapes and sizes, stood imposingly at one side, and on the other lay a neat ream of letter paper, crested and monogrammed, and a pronouncing dictionary. The apparatus certainly seemed quite adequate to the demands of the occasion; and as it turned out, it contained a good deal that was absolutely unnecessary, for the young lady slipped into an unobtrusive doze, the moment the lecturer began to address his class.
A young woman who had removed her hat in order to show that she had a brow with generous bumps scattered about it, resembling Kopjes above a kloof, lounged with an ungracefulness that a plebiscite had pronounced to have a distinct literary flavour about it, half across her desk. It was understood that she had once written a column in a lady's paper on something and so could afford to be careless.
A youth with a cloak and a yellow smile was understood to be a poet. People said that his smile would work off. But he had never tried.