Susan Pulls the Strings spine (Children's Press)

A nice scan of the spine of the Children's Press edition of Susan Pulls the Strings. Here we see Susan at the beginning of the very first chapter of the book, doing her maths homework and feeling quite proud that she has worked out a theorem. The subject that she is working on is geometry. She comments, rather oddly in my point of view, that she "quite likes" geometry, if she has a decent point on her pencil. Even more curiously, she goes on to add that algebra is "not bad", but that she doesn't like arithmetic. As arithmetic is the easiest aspect of maths, preferring geometry and algebra sounds unusual, especially in the case of Susan as we gradually come to know her as the not-so-very-dedicated pupil she turns out to be at St. Ronan's. As noted in a previous post, which you can read here, maths teachers turned out to be the most unpopular instructors in all of Jane Shaw's school stories. But the main focus of the first chapter of Susan Pulls the Strings is to let the reader know that Susan will be moving to London to stay with the Carmichaels during her parents' sojourn in Africa, so the subject of her homework is not meant to be very important.