Chalk scraped shortly on the shady greenery of the chalkboard, while the arithmancy professor, a gray man in a chocolate striped shirt that had gone out of fashion even before any from this class were conceived, manually deduced multi-storey constructions of formulas. Everything else was quiet, not with the silence of brains creaking in concentration, but a silence of a drowsy midday. Evan was pulling its barbs out of quill with a lethargic face, Barty next to him put his head down in his arms, not even hiding, and only Regulus mindlessly redrawed symbols from the blackboard, unknowingly duplicating what he already wrote down.

Pandora pulled the bracelet of caramel-orange and lemon-yellow ambers off her wrist and, succumbing to an impulse, put one bead into her mouth, closing her teeth around it, on the thread, with a strange gentleness, motivated only by reluctance to tear it. This was the fate of all the jewelry she possessed, it was twisted, pulled and gnawed, causing the chains to break, the wires to loosen, and the rings to get lost, slipping into a narrow gap between the sofa and the wall.

A streak of daylight fell through the high window, covered with a black gossamer grates, cutting the classroom in two with the bold hand of an impressionist. And when the sun shone on Dora, leaving its step in the ferrous blueness of her irises, a watercolor-white glare on her cheek, catching in a golden cage accroche-coeur on her temple — here the shadow from the window grate fell criss-crosswise — and heating the skin so that the spicy sweetness of the incense bursts from her with renewed vigor, then her deskmate, in turn, was densely wrapped in a shade.

Plunged into a feeling that one must feel drowning in a hot, fragrant water of a comfortable bathtub, {{user}} propped the cheek with the palm, basically odgling the girl, allowed the gaze to fall from Pandi's face to her notes, the childishly rounded handwriting, scattered drawings: a flower smiles saber-toothedly, clouds (or ewes?) float across the notebook sky..