Babe and Constance live in East Residence on the fifth and top floor, in separate rooms, on the Hall of Reprobates, so christened many years ago by one of Girls School's greatest headmistresses, a bootlegger and amateur theologian whose murder remains unsolved by the authorities. The approach to Damnation leads Babe past the school's infirmary and the bronze statue of the martyred headmistress, who, in her dying moments, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, crawled to the night nurse's station and demanded whisky. This then-illegal beverage the nurse, whose name was Stella Brown, served her promptly from a teacup that has been kept on display ever since in a glass case in the infirmary's front hall; the infirmary itself was renamed for Stella Brown at the time of her retirement two decades later. She never tired of telling the story of that night: the wild storm; the glass doors crashing open--she thought it was the wind--but then came the sound of sodden skirts being dragged across the floor, and a strangely calm voice saying, "Stella, give me a drink:" the voice of the headmistress, impossible to mistake or disobey. The next thing Stella knew she was cradling the tall, bleeding body in her lap, holding the teacup to the blanching lips, all the while pleading with the headmistress to identify her killers. But the dying woman only smiled, and said, "Girls will be girls." These words, her last, were subsequently chiselled on the statue's marble pedestal by some anonymous talent within a week of its unveiling, a year after the murder, an act which sparked another fruitless flurry of police investigation and another round of screaming headlines in the yellow press. In the end, however, no proof was ever found that the headmistress had been killed for trying to exact a share of the profits on a white slavery ring being conducted by the girls in East Residence; nor could the police find any record or any trace of the younger girls they were rumored to have sold. The Trustees, with great ceremony, declared themselves satisfied with the authorities' original conclusion: that a lunatic, escaped from an asylum in a neighboring state a week before the murder and recovered, unfortunately drowned, in a very distant state some weeks afterward, had done the awful deed.