“‘into the vast vacuity of the empyrean,’” Miss Dawson read. “And can you tell me what ‘empyrean’ means?”

“It means,” Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. “It means ‘the highest heavens’.”

“Yes, the sky,” Miss Dawson said suspiciously. She handed the exercise-book to Angel, feeling baffled. The girl had a great reputation as a liar and when this strange essay had been handed in – “A Storm At Sea” – Miss Dawson had gone through it in a state of alarm, fearful lest she had read it before or ought to have read it before. She had spent an agitated evening scanning Pater and Ruskin and others. Though disdaining such ornamental prose, such crescendos and alliterations, before she would say the piece was vulgarly over-written she hoped to find out who had written it.

She had confided in the headmistress, who also felt the need for caution. She thought it a remarkable piece of writing for a girl of fifteen; if, indeed, it was by a girl of fifteen.

“Has she ever done anything like it before?”

“Nothing. A line of two covered with blots.”

“‘Lightning laced and veined the sky,’” the headmistress read. “Did you look through Oscar Wilde?”

“Yes, and Walter Pater.”

“You will have to question her. If she is making fools of us, it isn’t the first time.”

Angel, when feeling dull, was liable to faint and had once told a story of being followed from school through the gas-lit streets on a winter’s afternoon; though later, to a policeman, she confessed that she might have been mistaken.

She was questioned by Miss Dawson when the other girls had gone home. She doesn’t believe I wrote it, she thought, glancing with contempt at the flustered little woman with the slipping prince-nez and bird’s-nest hair. Who does she think wrote it if I didn’t? Who does she think could? What a way to spend your life – fussing over school-lessons, getting chalk all over your skirt, going home to lodgings at night to work out the next day’s Shakespeare – cut to page this, line that, so that we don’t have to read the word ‘womb’.