The headmistress was a greying female shaped like a wooden clothes rack—brittle bones with damp-looking textiles draped on them. She was sitting in her office, barricaded behind her oak desk, her shoulders up to her ears with terror. A year earlier I would have been as frightened of her as she was of me, or rather of what I represented: a big wad of money. Now however I had gained assurance. I had watched Winifred in action, I had practised. Now I could raise one eyebrow at a time.

She smiled nervously, displaying plump yellow teeth like the kernels on a half-eaten cob of corn. I wondered what Laura had been doing: it must have been something, to have worked her up to the point of confrontation with absent Richard and his unseen power. “I’m afraid we can’t really continue with Laura,” she said. “We have done our best, and we are aware that there are mitigating circumstances, but considering everything we do have to think of our other pupils, and I am afraid Laura is simply too disruptive an influence.”

I had learned, by then, the value of making other people explain themselves. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said, barely moving my lips. “What mitigating circumstances? What disruptive influence?” I kept my hands still in my lap, my head high and slightly tilted, the best angle for the pheasant hat. I hoped she would feel stared at by four eyes and not just by two. Though I had the benefit of wealth, hers was her age and position. It was hot in the office. I’d slung my coat over the back of the chair, but even so I was sweating like a stevedore.

“She is calling God into question,” she said, “in the Religious Knowledge class, which I have to say is the only subject in which she appears to take any interest whatsoever. She went so far as to produce an essay entitled, ‘Does God Lie?’ It was very unsettling to the entire class.”

“And what answer did she arrive at?” I asked. “About God?” I was surprised, though I didn’t show it: I’d thought Laura had been slackening off on the God question, but apparently not.

“An affirmative one.” She looked down at her desk, where Laura’s essay was spread out in front of her. “She cites—it’s right here—First Kings, chapter twenty-two—the passage in which God deceives King Ahab. ‘Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets.’ Laura goes on to say that if God did this once, how do we know he didn’t do it more than once, and how can we tell the false prophecies apart from the true ones?”

“Well, that’s a logical conclusion, at any rate,” I said. “Laura knows her Bible.”

“I dare say,” said the headmistress, exasperated. “The Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. She does proceed to remark that although God lies, he doesn’t cheat—he always sends a true prophet as well, but people don’t listen. In her opinion God is like a radio broadcaster and we are faulty radios, a comparison I find disrespectful, to say the least.”

“Laura doesn’t mean to be disrespectful,” I said. “Not about God, at any rate.”

The headmistress ignored this. “It’s not so much the specious arguments she makes, as the fact that she saw fit to pose the question in the first place.”

“Laura likes to have answers,” I said. “She likes to have answers on important matters. I am sure you’ll agree that God is an important matter. I don’t see why that should be considered disruptive.”

“The other students find it so. They believe she’s—well, showing off. Challenging established authority.”

“As Christ did,” I said, “or so some people thought at the time.”

She did not make the obvious point that such things may have been all very well for Christ but they were not appropriate in a sixteen-year-old girl. “You don’t quite understand,” she said. She actually wrung her hands, an operation I studied with interest, having never seen it before. “The others think she’s—they think she’s being funny. Or Some of them do. Others think she’s a Bolshevik. The rest just consider her odd. In any case, she attracts the wrong kind of attention.”

I began to see her point. “I don’t expect Laura intends to be funny,” I said.

“But it’s so hard to tell!” We looked across her desk at each other for a moment of silence. “She has quite a following, you know,” said the headmistress, with a touch of envy. She waited for me to absorb this, then went on. “It’s also a question of her absences. I understand there are health problems, but…”

“What health problems?” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with Laura’s health.”

“Well, I assumed, considering all of the doctor’s appointments…”

“What doctor’s appointments?”

“You didn’t authorize them?” She produced a sheaf of letters. I recognized the notepaper, which was mine. I looked through them: I hadn’t written them, but they were signed with my name.

“I see,” I said, gathering up my wolverine coat and my handbag. “I will have to speak to Laura. Thank you for your time.” I shook the ends of her fingers. It went without saying, now, that Laura would have to be withdrawn from the school.

“We did try our best,” said the poor woman. She was practically weeping. Another Miss Violence, this one. A hired drudge, well-meaning but ineffectual. No match for Laura.

That evening, when Richard asked how my interview had gone, I told him about Laura’s disruptive effect on her classmates. Instead of being angry he seemed amused, and close to admiring. He said Laura had backbone. He said a certain amount of rebelliousness showed getup-and-go. He himself had disliked school and had made life difficult for the teachers, he said. I didn’t think this had been Laura’s motive, but I didn’t say so.

I didn’t mention the false doctor notes to him: that would have set the cat among the pigeons. Bothering teachers was one thing, playing hookey would have been quite another. It smacked of delinquency.

“You shouldn’t have forged my handwriting,” I said to Laura privately.

“I couldn’t forge Richard’s. It’s too different from ours. Yours was a lot easier.”

“Handwriting is a personal thing. It’s like stealing.”

She did look chagrined, for a moment. “I’m sorry. I was only borrowing. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“I suppose there’s no point in wondering why you did it?”

“I never asked to be sent to that school,” said Laura. “They didn’t like me any more than I liked them. They didn’t take me seriously. They aren’t serious people. If I’d had to be there all the time, I really would have got sick.”

“What were you doing,” I said, “when you weren’t at school? Where did you go?” I was worried that she might have been meeting someone—meeting a man. She was getting to be the age for it.

“Oh, here and there,” said Laura. “I went downtown, or I sat in parks and things. Or I just walked around. I saw you, a couple of times, but you didn’t see me. I guess you were going shopping.” I felt a surge of blood to the heart, then a constriction: panic, like a hand squeezing me shut. I must have gone pale.

“What’s wrong?” said Laura. “Don’t you feel well?”

That May we crossed to England on the Berengeria, then returned to New York on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary. The Queen was the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built, or that’s what was written in all the brochures. It was an epoch-making event, said Richard.

Winifred came with us. Also Laura. Such a voyage would do her a lot of good, said Richard: she’d been looking pinched and weedy, she’d been at loose ends ever since her abrupt departure from school. The trip would be an education for her, of the kind a girl like her could really use. Anyway, we could scarcely leave her behind.

The public couldn’t get enough of the Queen Mary. It was described and photographed within an inch of its life, and decorated that way too, with strip lighting and plastic laminates and fluted columns and maple burr—costly veneers everywhere. But it wallowed like a pig, and the second-class deck overlooked the first-class one, so you couldn’t walk about there without a railing-full of impecunious gawkers checking you over.