Temples of delight

Jem McCrail is a fantastical godsend to the timid young Alice Pilling. "Like a dropped acorn, " she appears halfway through the week, halfway through the term, and halfway through Miss Aldridge's Silent Reading Hour. Through the doorway she barely clears, wearing clothes like the cowshed-crouching urchin she encountered in her favorite P. G. Wodehouse story, Jem leads the stammering Alice into a world of culture, truancy, and bizarrerie-a world far beyond the desiccated lessons of school. The girls cultivate a steadfast bond based on a wicked and encircling sense of humor, an impish joy in indelicate literature, and Mozart's The Magic Flute.