Chapter IV: Part 4

It was a heavy tax. From what resources some girls drew their supplies remained ever a mystery to us. How could Ellie Plunkett have found the opportunity to perform four deeds of kindness, and resist seven temptations, in a day? We never had any temptations to resist. Perhaps when one came along, we yielded to it so quickly that it had ceased to tempt before its true character had been ascertained. And to whom was Ellie Plunkett so overweeningly kind? "Who wants Ellie Plunkett to be kind to her?" was Tony's scornful query. There was Adelaide Harrison, too, actually turning in twenty acts as one day's crop, and smiling modestly when Madame Duncan praised her self-denial. Yet, to our unwarped judgment, she seemed much the same as ever. We, at least, refused to accept her estimate of her own well-spent life.

"Making an act" was the convent phraseology for doing without something one wanted, for stopping short on the verge of an innocent gratification. If I gave up my place in the swing to Viola Milton, that was an act. If I walked to the woods with Annie Churchill, when I wanted to walk with Elizabeth, that was an act. If I ate my bread unbuttered, or drank my tea unsweetened, that was an act. It will be easily understood that the constant practice of acts deprived life of everything that made it worth the living. We were so trained in this system of renunciation that it was impossible to enjoy even the very simple pleasures that our convent table afforded. If there were anything we particularly liked, our nagging little consciences piped up with their intolerable "Make an act, make an act;" and it was only when the last mouthful was resolutely swallowed that we could feel sure we had triumphed over asceticism. There was something maddening in the example set us by our neighbours, by those virtuous and pious girls who hemmed us in at study time and at our meals. When Mary Rawdon gently waved aside the chocolate custard--which was the very best chocolate custard it has ever been my good fortune to eat--and whispered to me as she did so, "An act for the bouquet;" I whispered back, "Take it, and give it to me," and held out my plate with defiant greed. Annie Churchill told us she hadn't eaten any butter for a week; whereat Tony called her an idiot, and Annie--usually the mildest of girls--said that "envy at another's spiritual good" was a very great sin, and that Tony had committed it. There is nothing so souring to the temper as abstinence.

What made it singularly hard to sacrifice our young lives for the swelling of a spiritual bouquet was that Reverend Mother, who was to profit by our piety, had so little significance in our eyes. She was as remote from the daily routine of the school as the Grand Lama is remote from the humble Thibetans whom he rules; and if we regarded her with a lively awe, it was only because of her aloofness, of the reserves that hedged her majestically round. She was an Englishwoman of good family, and of vast bulk. There was a tradition that she had been married and widowed before she became a nun; but this was a subject upon which we were not encouraged to talk. It was considered both disrespectful and indecorous. Reverend Mother's voice was slow and deep, a ponderous voice to suit her ponderous size; and she spoke with what seemed to us a strange and barbarous accent, pronouncing certain words in a manner which I have since learned was common in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and which a few ripe scholars are now endeavouring to reintroduce. She was near-sighted to the verge of blindness, and always at Mass used a large magnifying glass, like the one held by Leo the Tenth in Raphael's portrait. She was not without literary tastes of an insipid and obsolete order, the tastes of an English gentlewoman, reared in the days when young ladies read the "Female Spectator," and warbled "Oh, no, we never mention her." Had she not "entered religion," she might have taken Moore and Byron to her heart,--as did one little girl whose "Childe Harold" lay deeply hidden in a schoolroom desk,--but the rejection of these profane poets had left her stranded upon such feeble substitutes as Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whose mysterious death she was occasionally heard to deplore.

Twice on Sundays Reverend Mother crossed our orbit; in the morning, when she instructed the whole school in Christian doctrine, and at night, when she presided over Primes. During the week we saw her only at Mass. We should never even have known about Letitia Elizabeth Landon, had she not granted an occasional audience to the graduates, and discoursed to them sleepily upon the books she had read in her youth. Whatever may have been her qualifications for her post (she had surpassing dignity of carriage, and was probably a woman of intelligence and force), to us she was a mere embodiment of authority, as destitute of personal malice as of personal charm. I detested Madame Bouron, and loved Madame Rayburn. Elizabeth detested Madame Bouron, and loved Madame Dane. Emily detested Madame Bouron, and loved Madame Duncan. These were emotions, amply nourished, and easily understood. We were capable of going to great lengths to prove either our aversion or our love. But to give up chocolate custard for Reverend Mother was like suffering martyrdom for a creed we did not hold.

"It's because Reverend Mother is so fond of geography that we're going to have the competition," said Lilly. "Madame Duncan told me so."

"Why can't Reverend Mother, if she likes it so much, learn it for herself?" asked Tony sharply. "I'll lend her my atlas."

"Oh, she knows it all," said Lilly, rather scandalized. "Madame Duncan told me it was her favourite study, and that she knew the geography of the whole world."

"Then I don't see why she wants to hear us say it," observed Elizabeth, apparently under the impression that competitions, like gladiatorial shows, were gotten up solely for the amusement of an audience. It never occurred to her, nor indeed to any of us, to attach any educational value to the performance. We conceived that we were butchered to make a convent holiday.

"And it's because Reverend Mother is so fond of music that we are going to have an operetta instead of a play," went on Lilly, pleased to have information to impart.

I sighed heavily. How could anybody prefer anything to a play? I recognized an operetta as a form of diversion, and was grateful for it, as I should have been grateful for any entertainment, short of an organ recital. We were none of us surfeited with pleasures. But to me song was at best only an imperfect mode of speech; and the meaningless repetition of a phrase, which needed to be said but once, vexed my impatient spirit. We were already tolerably familiar with "The Miracle of the Roses." For two weeks past the strains had floated from every music room. We could hear, through the closed doors, Frances Fenton, who was to be St. Elizabeth of Hungary, quavering sweetly,--

"Unpretending and lowly,
Like spirits pure and holy,
I love the wild rose best,
I love the wild rose best,
I love the wi-i-ild rose best."

We could hear Ella Holrook announcing in her deep contralto,--

"'Tis the privilege of a Landgrave
To go where glory waits him,
Glory waits him;"

and the chorus trilling jubilantly,--

"Heaven has changed the bread to roses,
Heaven has changed the bread to roses."

Why, I wondered, did they have to say everything two and three times over? Even when the Landgrave detects St. Elizabeth in the act of carrying the loaves to the poor, his anger finds a vent in iteration.

"Once again you've dared to brave my anger,
Yes, once again you've dared to brave my anger;
My power you scorn,
My power you scorn."

To which the Saint replies gently, but tediously,--

"My lord they are,
My lord they are
But simple roses,
But simple ro-o-oses,
That I gathered in the garden even now."

"Suppose that bread hadn't been changed to roses," said Elizabeth speculatively, "I wonder what St. Elizabeth would have done."

"Oh, she knew it had been, because she prayed it would be," said Marie, who was something of a theologian.

"But suppose it hadn't."

"But it _had_, and she knew it had, because of her piety and faith," insisted Marie.

"I shouldn't have liked to risk it," murmured Elizabeth.

"_I_ think her husband was a pig," said Tony. "Going off to the Crusade, and making all that fuss about a few loaves of bread. If I'd been St. Elizabeth"--

She paused, determining her course of action, and Marie ruthlessly interposed. "If you're not a saint, you can't tell what you would do if you were a saint. You would be different."

There was no doubt that Tony as a saint would have to be so very different from the Tony whom we knew, that Marie's dogmatism prevailed. Even Elizabeth was silenced; and, in the pause that followed, Lilly had a chance to impart her third piece of information. "It's because Reverend Mother's name is Elizabeth," she said, "that we're going to have an operetta about St. Elizabeth; and Bessie Treves is to make the address."

"Thank Heaven, there is another Elizabeth in the school, or I might have to do it," cried our Elizabeth, who coveted no barren honours; and--even as she spoke--the blow fell. Madame Rayburn appeared at the schoolroom door, a folded paper in her hand. "Elizabeth," she said, and, with a hurried glance of apprehension, the saint's unhappy namesake withdrew. We looked at one another meaningly. "It's like giving thanks before you're sure of dinner," chuckled Tony.

I had no chance to hear any particulars until night, when Elizabeth watched her opportunity, and sallied forth to brush her teeth while I was dawdling over mine. The strictest silence prevailed in the dormitories, and no child left her alcove except for the ceremony of tooth-brushing, which was performed at one of two large tubs, stationed in the middle of the floor. These tubs--blessed be their memory!--served as centres of gossip. Friend met friend, and smothered confidences were exchanged. Our gayest witticisms,--hastily choked by a toothbrush,--our oldest and dearest jests were whispered brokenly to the accompaniment of little splashes of water. It was the last social event of our long social day, and we welcomed it as freshly as if we had not been in close companionship since seven o'clock in the morning. Elizabeth, scrubbing her teeth with ostentatious vigour, found a chance to tell me, between scrubs, that Bessie Treves had been summoned home for a week, and that she, as the only other bearer of Reverend Mother's honoured name, had been chosen to make the address. "It's the feast of St. Elizabeth," she whispered, "and the operetta is about St. Elizabeth, and they want an Elizabeth to speak. I wish I had been christened Melpomene."

"You couldn't have been christened Melpomene," I whispered back, keeping a watchful eye upon Madame Chapelle, who was walking up and down the dormitory, saying her beads. "It isn't a Christian name. There never was a St. Melpomene."

"It's nearly three pages long," said Elizabeth, alluding to the address, and not to the tragic Muse. "All about the duties of women, and how they ought to stay at home and be kind to the poor, like St. Elizabeth, and let their husbands go to the Crusades."

"But there are no Crusades any more for their husbands to go to," I objected.

Elizabeth looked at me restively. She did not like this fractious humour. "I mean let their husbands go to war," she said.

"But if there are no wars," I began, when Madame Chapelle, who had not been so inattentive as I supposed, intervened. "Elizabeth and Agnes, go back to your alcoves," she said. "You have been quite long enough brushing your teeth."

I flirted my last drops of water over Elizabeth, and she returned the favour with interest, having more left in her tumbler than I had. It was our customary good-night. Sometimes, when we were wittily disposed, we said "_Asperges me_." That was one of the traditional jests of the convent. Generations of girls had probably said it before us. Our language was enriched with scraps of Latin and apt quotations, borrowed from Church services, the Penitential Psalms, and the catechism.

For two days Elizabeth studied the address, and for two days more she rehearsed it continuously under Madame Rayburn's tutelage. At intervals she recited portions of it to us, and we favoured her with our candid criticisms. Tony objected vehemently to the very first line:--

"A woman's path is ours to humbly tread."

She said she didn't intend to tread it humbly at all; that Elizabeth might be as humble as she pleased (Elizabeth promptly disclaimed any personal sympathy with the sentiment), and that Marie and Agnes were welcome to all the humility they could practise (Marie and Agnes rejected their share of the virtue), but that she--Tony--was tired of behaving like an affable worm. To this, Emily, with more courage than courtesy, replied that a worm Tony might be, but an affable worm, never; and Elizabeth headed off any further retort by hurrying on with the address.

"A woman's path is ours to humbly tread,
And yet to lofty heights our hopes are led.
We may not share the Senate's stern debate,
Nor guide with faltering hand the helm of state;
Ours is the holier right to soften party hate,
And teach the lesson, lofty and divine,
Ambition's fairest flowers are laid at Virtue's shrine."

"Have you any idea what all that means?" asked Marie discontentedly.

"Oh, I don't have to say what it means," returned Elizabeth, far too sensible to try to understand anything she would not be called upon to explain. "Reverend Mother makes that out for herself."

"Not ours the right to guide the battle's storm,
Where strength and valour deathless deeds perform.
Not ours to bind the blood-stained laurel wreath
In mocking triumph round the brow of death.
No! 'tis our lot to save the failing breath,
'Tis ours to heal each wound, and hush each moan,
To take from other hearts the pain into our own."

"It seems to me," said Tony, "that we are expected to do all the work, and have none of the fun."

"It seems to _me_," said Marie, "that by the time we have filled ourselves up with other people's pains, we won't care much about fun. Did Reverend Mother, I wonder, heal wounds and hush up moans?"

"St. Elizabeth did," explained Elizabeth. "Her husband went to the Holy Land, and was killed, and then she became a nun. There are some lines at the end, that I don't know yet, about Reverend Mother,--

'Seeking the shelter of the cloister gate,
Like the dear Saint whose name we venerate.'

Madame Rayburn wants me to make an act, and learn the rest of it at recreation this afternoon. That horrid old geography takes up all my study time."

"I've made three acts to-day," observed Lilly complacently, "and said a whole pair of beads this morning at Mass for the spiritual bouquet."

"I haven't made one act," I cried aghast. "I haven't done anything at all, and I don't know what to do."

"You might make one now," said Elizabeth thoughtfully, "and go talk to Adelaide Harrison."

I glanced at Adelaide, who was sitting on the edge of her desk, absorbed in a book. "Oh, I don't want to," I wailed.

"If you wanted to, it wouldn't be an act," said Elizabeth.

"But she doesn't want me to," I urged. "She is reading 'Fabiola.'"

"Then you'll give her the chance to make an act, too," said the relentless Elizabeth.

Argued into a corner, I turned at bay. "I won't," I said resolutely; to which Elizabeth replied: "Well, I wouldn't either, in your place," and the painful subject was dropped.

Four days before the feast the excitement had reached fever point, though the routine of school life went on with the same smooth precision. Every penny had been hoarded up for the candy fair. It was with the utmost reluctance that we bought even the stamps for our home letters, those weekly letters we were compelled to write, and which were such pale reflections of our eager and vehement selves. Perhaps this was because we knew that every line was read by Madame Bouron before it left the convent; perhaps the discipline of those days discouraged familiarity with our parents; perhaps the barrier which nature builds between the adult and the normal child was alone responsible for our lack of spontaneity. Certain it is that the stiffly written pages despatched to father or to mother every Sunday night gave no hint of our abundant and restless vitality, our zest for the little feast of life, our exaltations, our resentments, our thrice-blessed absurdities. Entrenched in the citadel of childhood, with laws of our own making, and passwords of our own devising, our souls bade defiance to the world.

If all our hopes centred in the _congé_, the candy fair, and the operetta,--which was to be produced on a scale of unwonted magnificence,--our time was sternly devoted to the unpitying exactions of geography. Every night we took our atlases to bed with us, under the impression that sleeping on a book would help us to remember its contents. As the atlases were big, and our pillows very small, this device was pregnant with discomfort. On the fourth night before the feast, something wonderful happened. It was the evening study hour, and I was wrestling sleepily with the mountains of Asia,--hideous excrescences with unpronounceable and unrememberable names,--when Madame Rayburn entered the room. As we rose to our feet, we saw that she looked very grave, and our minds took a backward leap over the day. Had we done anything unusually bad, anything that could call down upon us a public indictment, and was Madame Rayburn for once filling Madame Bouron's office? We could think of nothing; but life was full of pitfalls, and there was no sense of security in our souls. We waited anxiously.

"Children," said Madame Rayburn, "I have sorrowful news for you. Reverend Mother has been summoned to France. She sails on her feast day, and leaves for New York to-morrow."

We stared open-mouthed and aghast. The ground seemed sinking from under our feet, the walls crumbling about us. Reverend Mother sailing for France! And on her feast day, too,--the feast for which so many ardent preparations had been made. The _congé_, the competition, the address, the operetta, the spiritual bouquet, the candy fair,--were they, too, sailing away into the land of lost things? To have asked one of the questions that trembled on our lips would have been an unheard-of liberty. We listened in respectful silence, our eyes riveted on Madame Rayburn's face.

"You will all go to the chapel now," she said. "To-night we begin a novena to _Mater Admirabilis_ for Reverend Mother's safe voyage. She dreads it very much, and she is sad at leaving you. Pray for her devoutly. Madame Dane will bring you down to the chapel."

She turned to go. Our hearts beat violently. She knew, she could not fail to know, the thought that was uppermost in every mind. She was too experienced and too sympathetic to miss the significance of our strained and wistful gaze. A shadowy smile crossed her face. "Madame Bouron would have told you to-morrow," she said, "what I think I shall tell you to-night. It is Reverend Mother's express desire that you should have your _congé_ on her feast, though she will not be here to enjoy it with you."

A sigh of relief, a sigh which we could not help permitting to be audible, shivered softly around the room. The day was saved; yet, as we marched to the chapel, there was a turmoil of agitation in our hearts. We knew that from far-away France--from a mysterious and all-powerful person who dwelt there, and who was called Mother General--came the mandates which governed our community. This was not the first sudden departure we had witnessed; but Reverend Mother seemed so august, so permanent, so immobile. Her very size protested mutely against upheaval. Should we never again see that familiar figure sitting in her stall, peering through her glass into a massive prayer-book, a leviathan of prayer-books, as imposing in its way as she was, or blinking sleepily at us as we filed by? Why, if somebody were needed in France, had it not pleased Mother General to send for Madame Bouron? Many a dry eye would have seen _her_ go. But then, as Lilly whispered to me, suppose it had been Madame Rayburn. There was a tightening of my heart-strings at the thought, a sudden suffocating pang, dimly foreboding the grief of another year.

The consensus of opinion, as gathered that evening in the dormitory, was not unlike the old Jacobite epitaph on Frederick, Prince of Wales. Every one of us was sincerely sorry that Madame Bouron had not been summoned,--

"Had it been his father,
We had much rather;"

but glad that Madame Dane, or Madame Rayburn, or Madame Duncan, or some other favourite nun had escaped.

"Since it's only Fred
Who was alive, and is dead,
There is no more to be said."

The loss of our Superioress was bewildering, but not, for us, a thing of deep concern. We should sleep as sweetly as usual that night.

The next morning we were all gathered into the big First Cours classroom, where Reverend Mother came to bid us good-by. It was a solemn leave-taking. The address was no longer in order; but the spiritual bouquet had been made up the night before, and was presented in our name by Madame Bouron, who read out the generous sum-total of prayers, and acts, and offered-up trials, and resisted temptations, which constituted our feast-day gift. As Reverend Mother listened, I saw a large tear roll slowly down her cheek, and my heart smote me--my heart was always smiting me when it was too late--that I had contributed so meagrely to the donation. I remembered the chocolate custard, and thought--for one mistaken moment--that I should never want to taste of that beloved dish again. Perhaps if I had offered it up, Reverend Mother would cross the sea in safety. Perhaps, because I ate it, she would have storms, and be drowned. The doubtful justice of this arrangement was no more apparent to me than its unlikelihood. We were accustomed to think that the wide universe was planned and run for our reward and punishment. A rainy Sunday following the misdeeds of Saturday was to us a logical sequence of events.

When the bouquet had been presented, Reverend Mother said a few words of farewell. She said them as if she were sad at heart, not only at crossing the ocean, not only at parting from her community, but at leaving us, as well. I suppose she loved us collectively. She couldn't have loved us individually, knowing us only as two long rows of uniformed, curtsying schoolgirls, whose features she was too near-sighted to distinguish. On the other hand, if our charms and our virtues were lost to her, so were our less engaging qualities. Perhaps, taken collectively, we were rather lovable. Our uniforms were spotless, our hair superlatively smooth,--no blowsy, tossing locks, as in these days of libertinism, and our curtsies as graceful as hours of practice could make them. We sank and rose like the crest of a wave. On the whole, Reverend Mother had the best of us. Madame Bouron might have been pardoned for taking a less sentimental view of the situation.

That afternoon, while we were at French class, Reverend Mother departed. We heard the carriage roll away, but were not permitted to rush to the windows and look at it, which would have been a welcome distraction from our verbs. An hour later, at recreation, Madame Rayburn sent for Elizabeth. She was gone fifteen minutes, and came back, tense with suppressed excitement.

"Oh, what is it?" we cried. "The _congé_ is all right?"

"All right," said Elizabeth.

"And the candy fair?" asked Lilly, whose father had given her a dollar to squander upon sweets.

"Oh, it's all right, too. The candy is here now; and Ella Holrook and Mary Denniston and Isabel Summers are to have charge of the tables. Madame Dane told me that yesterday."

Our faces lightened, and then fell. "Is it the competition?" I asked apprehensively.

Elizabeth looked disconcerted. It was plain she knew nothing about the competition, and hated to avow her ignorance. We always felt so important when we had news to tell. "Of course, after studying all that geography, we'll have to say it sooner or later," she said. "But"--a triumphant pause--"a new Reverend Mother is coming to-morrow."

"_Ciel!_" murmured Marie, relapsing into agitated French; while Tony whistled softly, and Emily and I stared at each other in silence. The speed with which things were happening took our breath away.

"Coming to-morrow," repeated Elizabeth; "and I'm going to say the address as a welcome to her, on the night of the _congé_, before the operetta."

"Is her name Elizabeth, too?" I asked, bewildered.

"No, her name is Catherine. Madame Rayburn is going to leave out the lines about St. Elizabeth, and put in something about St. Catherine of Siena instead. That's why she wanted the address. And she is going to change the part about not sharing the Senate's stern debate, nor guiding with faltering hand the helm of state, because St. Catherine did guide the helm of state. At least, she went to Avignon, and argued with the Pope."

"Argued with the Pope!" echoed Marie, scandalized.

"She was a saint, Marie," said Elizabeth impatiently, and driving home an argument with which Marie herself had familiarized us. "She persuaded the Pope to go back to Rome. Madame Rayburn would like Kate Shaw to make the address; but she says there isn't time for another girl to study it."

"When is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena?" cried Tony, fired suddenly by a happy thought. "Maybe we'll have another _congé_ then."

She rushed off to consult her prayer-book. Lilly followed her, and in a moment their two heads were pressed close together, as they scanned the Roman calendar hopefully. But before my eyes rose the image of Reverend Mother, our lost Reverend Mother, with the slow teardrop rolling down her cheek. Her operetta was to be sung to another. Her address was to be made to another. Her very saint was pushed aside in honour of another holy patroness. "The King is dead. Long live the King."

The Game of Love

It was an ancient and honourable convent custom for the little girls in the Second Cours to cultivate an ardent passion for certain carefully selected big girls in the First Cours, to hold a court of love, and vie with one another in extravagant demonstrations of affection. We were called "satellites," and our homage was understood to be of that noble and exalted nature which is content with self-immolation. No response of any kind was ever vouchsafed us. No favours of any kind were ever granted us. The objects of our devotion--ripe scholars sixteen and seventeen years old--regarded us either with good-humoured indifference or unqualified contempt. Any other line of action on their part would have been unprecedented and disconcerting. We did not want petting. We were not the lap-dog variety of children. We wanted to play the game of love according to set rules,--rules which we found in force when we came to school, and which we had no mind to alter.

Yet one of these unwritten laws--which set a limit to inconstancy--I had already broken; and Elizabeth, who was an authority on the code, offered a grave remonstrance. "We really don't change that quickly," she said with concern.

I made no answer. I had "changed" very quickly, and, though incapable of self-analysis, I was not without a dim foreboding that I would change again.

"You were wild about Isabel Summers," went on Elizabeth accusingly.

"No, I wasn't," I confessed.

"But you said you were."

Again I was silent. The one thing a child cannot do is explain a complicated situation, even to another child. How could I hope to make Elizabeth understand that, eager to worship at some shrine, I had chosen Isabel Summers with a deliberation that boded ill for my fidelity. She was a thin, blue-eyed girl, with a delicate purity of outline, and heavy braids of beautiful fair hair. Her loveliness, her sensitive temperament, her early and tragic death (she was drowned the following summer), enshrined her sweetly in our memories. She became one of the traditions of the school, and we told her tale--as of another Virginia--to all new-comers. But in the early days when I laid my heart at her feet, I knew only that she had hair like pale sunshine, and that, for a First Cours girl, she was strangely tolerant of my attentions. If I ventured to offer her the dozen chestnuts that had rewarded an hour's diligent search, she thanked me for them with a smile. If I darned her stockings with painstaking neatness,--a privilege solicited from Sister O'Neil, who had the care of our clothes,--she sometimes went so far as to commend my work. I felt that I was blessed beyond my comrades (Ella Holrook snubbed Tony, and Antoinette Mayo ignored Lilly's existence), yet there were moments when I detected a certain insipidity in the situation. It lacked the incentive of impediment.

Then in November, Julia Reynolds, who had been absent, I know not why, returned to school; and I realized the difference between cherishing a tender passion and being consumed by one, between fanning a flame and being burned. To make all this clear to Elizabeth, who was passion proof, lay far beyond my power. When she said,--

"Holy Saint Francis! what a change is here,"

--or words to that effect,--I had not even Romeo's feeble excuses to offer, though I was as obstinate as Romeo in clinging to my new love. Tony supported me, having a roving fancy of her own, and being constant to Ella Holrook, only because that imperious graduate regarded her as an intolerable nuisance.

Julia's views on the subject of satellites were even more pronounced. She enjoyed a painful popularity in the Second Cours, and there were always half a dozen children abjectly and irritatingly in love with her. She was held to be the cleverest girl in the school, a reputation skilfully maintained by an unbroken superciliousness of demeanour. Her handsome mouth was set in scornful lines; her words, except to chosen friends, were few and cold. She carried on an internecine warfare with Madame Bouron, fighting that redoubtable nun with her own weapons,--icy composure, a mock humility, and polite phrases that carried a hidden sting. It was for this, for her arrogance,--she was as contemptuous as a cat,--and for a certain elusiveness, suggestive even to my untrained mind of new and strange developments, that I surrendered to her for a season all of my heart,--all of it, at least, that was not the permanent possession of Madame Rayburn and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was not playing the game. She was nobody's satellite just then, being occupied with a new cult for a new nun, whom it pleased her to have us all adore. The new nun, Madame Dane, was a formidable person, whom, left to myself, I should have timorously avoided; but for whom, following Elizabeth's example, I acquired in time a very creditable enthusiasm. She was tall and high-shouldered, and she had what Colly Cibber felicitously describes as a "poking head." We, who had yet to hear of Colly Cibber, admired this peculiar carriage,--Elizabeth said it was aristocratic,--and we imitated it as far as we dared, which was not very far, our shoulders being as rigorously supervised as our souls. Any indication of a stoop on _my_ part was checked by an hour's painful promenade up and down the corridor, with a walking-stick held between my elbows and my back, and a heavy book balanced on my head. The treatment was efficacious. Rather than be so wearisomely ridiculous, I held myself straight as a dart.

Madame Dane, for all her lack of deportment, was the stiffest and sternest of martinets. She had a passion for order, for precision, for symmetry. It was, I am sure, a lasting grievance to her that we were of different heights, and that we could never acquire the sameness and immobility of chessmen. She did her best by arranging and rearranging us in the line of procession when we marched down to the chapel, unable to decide whether Elizabeth was a hair's breadth taller than Tony, whether Mary Aylmer and Eloise Didier matched exactly, whether Viola had better walk before Maggie McCullah, or behind her. She never permitted us to open our desks during study hours, or when we were writing our exercises. This was a general rule, but Madame Dane alone enforced it absolutely. If I forgot to take my grammar or my natural philosophy out of my desk when I sat down to work (and I was an addlepated child who forgot everything), I had to go to class with my grammar or my natural philosophy unstudied, and bear the consequences. To have borrowed my neighbour's book would have been as great a breach of discipline as to have hunted for my own. At night and morning prayers we were obliged to lay our folded hands in exactly the same position on the second rung of our chair backs. If we lifted them unconsciously to the top rung, Madame Dane swooped down upon us like a falcon upon errant doves,--which was dreadfully distracting to our devotions.

"I don't see how she stands our hair being of different lengths," said Tony. "It must worry her dreadfully. I caught her the other night eyeing Eloise Didier's long plats and my little pigtails in a most uneasy manner. Some day she'll insist on our all having it cut short, like Elizabeth and Agnes."

"That would be sensible," said Elizabeth stoutly, while Lilly put up her hands with a quick, instinctive gesture, as if to save her curly locks from destruction.

"_You_ needn't talk," went on Tony with impolite emphasis, "after what you made her go through last Sunday. You and Agnes in your old black veils. I don't believe she was able to read her Mass prayers for looking at you."

Elizabeth grinned. She was not without a humorous enjoyment of the situation. Our black veils, which throughout the week were considered decorous and devotional, indicated on Sundays--when white veils were in order--a depth of unpardoned and unpardonable depravity. When Elizabeth and I were condemned to wear ours to Sunday Mass and Vespers,--two little black sheep in that vast snowy flock,--we were understood to be, for the time, moral lepers, to be cut off from spiritual communion with the elect. We were like those eminent sinners who, in the good old days when people had an eye to effect, did penance in sheets and with lighted tapers at cathedral doors,--thus adding immeasurably to the interest of church-going, and to the general picturesqueness of life. The ordeal was not for us the harrowing thing it seemed. Elizabeth's practical mind had but a feeble grasp of symbols. Burne-Jones and Maeterlinck would have conveyed no message to her, and a black veil amid the Sunday whiteness failed to disturb her equanimity. As for me, I was content to wear what Elizabeth wore. Where MacGregor sat was always the head of the table. The one real sufferer was the innocent Madame Dane, whose Sabbath was embittered by the sight of two sable spots staining the argent field, and by the knowledge that the culprits were her own Second Cours children, for whom she held herself responsible.

"She told me," said Elizabeth, "that if ever I let such a thing happen to me again, I shouldn't walk by her side all winter."

Lilly lifted her eyebrows, and Tony gave a grunt of deep significance. It meant that this would be an endurable misfortune. A cult was all very well, and Tony, like the rest of us, was prepared to play an honourable part. But Elizabeth's persistent fancy for walking by our idol's side at recreation had become a good deal of a nuisance. We considered that Madame Dane was, for a grown-up person, singularly vivacious and agreeable. She told us some of Poe's stories--notably "The Pit and the Pendulum"--in a manner which nearly stopped the beating of our hearts. We were well disposed even to her rigours. There was a straightforwardness about her methods which commended itself to our sense of justice no less than to our sense of humour. She dealt with us after fashions of her own; and, if she were constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between wilful murder and crossing one's legs in class, she would have scorned to carry any of our misdemeanours to Madame Bouron's tribunal. We felt that she had companionable qualities, rendered in some measure worthless by her advanced years; for, after all, adults have but a narrow field in which to exercise their gifts. There was a pleasant distinction in walking by Madame Dane's side up and down Mulberry Avenue, even in the unfamiliar society of Adelaide Harrison, and Mary Rawdon, who was a green ribbon, and Ellie Plunkett, who was head of the roll of honour; but it would have been much better fun to have held aloof, and have played that we were English gypsies, and that Madame Dane was Ulrica of the Banded Brow,--just then our favourite character in fiction.

Ulrica sounds, I am aware, as if she belonged in the Castle of Udolpho; but she was really a virtuous and nobly spoken outlaw in a story called "Wild Times," which was the most exciting book--the only madly exciting book--the convent library contained. It dealt with the religious persecutions of Elizabeth's glorious but stringent reign, and was a good, thorough-going piece of partisan fiction, like Fox's "Book of Martyrs," or Wodrow's "Sufferings of the Church of Scotland." I cannot now remember why Ulrica's brow was banded,--I believe she had some dreadful mark upon it,--but she was always alluding to its screened condition in words of thrilling intensity. "Seek not to know the secret of my shame. Never again shall the morning breeze nor the cool breath of evening fan Ulrica's brow."--"Tear from my heart all hope, all pity, all compunction; but venture not to lift the veil which hides forever from the eye of man the blighting token of Ulrica's shame." We loved to picture this mysterious lady--whose life, I hasten to say, was most exemplary--as tall, high-shouldered, and stern, like Madame Dane; and we merged the two characters together in a very agreeable and convincing way. It enraptured us to speak of the mistress of the Second Cours as "Ulrica," to tell one another that some day we should surely forget, and call her by that name (than which nothing was less likely), and to wonder what she would say and do if she found out the liberty we had taken.

A little private diversion of this kind was all the more necessary because the whole business of loving was essentially a public affair. Not that we were capable of voicing our affections,--Marie alone had the gift of expression,--but we ranged ourselves in solid ranks for and against the favourites of the hour. The system had its disadvantages. It deprived us of individual distinction. I was confirmed that winter, and, having found out that Madame Dane's Christian name was Theresa, I resolved to take it for my confirmation name, feeling that this was a significant proof of tenderness. Unfortunately, three other children came to the same conclusion,--Ellie Plunkett was one of them,--and the four Theresas made such an impression upon the Archbishop that he congratulated us in a really beautiful manner upon our devotion to the great saint whose name we had chosen, and whose example, he trusted, would be our beacon light.

As for my deeper and more absorbing passion for Julia Reynolds, I could not hope to separate it, or at least to make her separate it, from the passions of her other satellites. She regarded us all with a cold and impartial aversion, which was not without excuse, in view of our reprehensible behaviour. Three times a day the Second Cours filed through the First Cours classroom, on its way to the refectory. The hall was always empty, as the older girls preceded us to our meals; but at noon their hats and coats and shawls were laid neatly out upon their chairs, ready to be put on as soon as dinner was eaten. Julia Reynolds had a black and white plaid shawl, the sight of which goaded us to frenzy. If Madame Dane's eyes were turned for one instant from our ranks, some daring child shot madly across the room, wrenched a bit of fringe from this beloved shawl, and, returning in triumph with her spoil, wore it for days (I always lost mine) pinned as a love-knot to the bib of her alpaca apron. Viola Milton performed this feat so often that she became purveyor of fringe to less audacious girls, and gained honour and advantages thereby. Not content with such vandalism, she conceived the daring project of stealing a lock of hair. She hid herself in a music room, and, when Julia went by to her music lesson, stole silently behind her, and snipped off the end of one of her long brown braids. This, with the generosity of a highwayman, she distributed, in single hairs, to all who clamoured for them. To me she gave half a dozen, which I gummed up for safe-keeping in an envelope, and never saw again.

It was a little trying that Viola--certainly, as I have made plain, the least deserving of us all--should have been the only child who ever obtained a word of kindness from our divinity. But this was the irony of fate. Three days after the rape of the lock, she was sent to do penance for one of her many misdemeanours by sitting under the clock in the corridor, a post which, for some mysterious reason, was consecrated to the atonement of sin. In an hour she returned, radiant, beatified. Julia Reynolds had gone by on her way to the chapel; and seeing the little solitary figure--which looked pathetic, though it wasn't--had given her a fleeting smile, and had said "Poor Olie," as she passed.

This was hard to bear. It all came, as I pointed out acrimoniously to Tony, of Viola's being at least a head shorter than she had any business to be at ten years old, and of her having such absurdly thin legs, and great, melancholy eyes. Of course people felt sorry for her, whereas they might have known--they ought to have known--that she was incapable of being abashed. She would just as soon have sat astride the clock as under it.

One advantage, however, I possessed over all competitors. I took drawing lessons, and so did Julia Reynolds. Twice a week I sat at a table near her, and spent an hour and a half very pleasantly and profitably in watching all she did. I could not draw. My mother seemed to think that because I had no musical talent, and never in my life was able to tell one note--nor indeed one tune--from another, I must, by way of adjustment, have artistic qualities. Mr. James Payn was wont to say that his gift for mathematics consisted mainly of distaste for the classics. On precisely the same principle, I was put to draw because I could not play or sing. An all-round incapacity was, in those primitive days, a thing not wholly understood.

The only branch of my art I acquired to perfection was the sharpening of pencils and crayons; and, having thoroughly mastered this accomplishment, I ventured in a moment of temerity to ask Julia if I might sharpen hers. At first she decisively refused; but a week or two later, seeing the deftness of my work, and having a regard for her own hands, she relented, and allowed me this privilege. Henceforward I felt that my drawing lessons were not given in vain. Even Dr. Eckhart's unsparing condemnation of my sketches--which were the feeblest of failures--could not destroy my content. Love was with me a stronger emotion than vanity. I used to look forward all week to those two happy afternoons when I was graciously permitted to waste my time and blacken my fingers in humble and unrequited service.

Julia drew beautifully. She excelled in every accomplishment, as in every branch of study. She sang, she played, she painted, she danced, with bewildering ease and proficiency. French and Latin presented no stumbling-blocks to her. The heights and abysses of composition were for her a level and conquered country. Logic and geometry were, so to speak, her playthings. We were bewildered by such universality of genius,--something like Michael Angelo's,--and when I remember that, in addition to these legitimate attainments, she was the most gifted actress on our convent stage, I am at a loss now to understand why the world is not ringing with her name.

Certain it is that she was the pride of Dr. Eckhart's heart, the one solace of his harassed and tormented life. He was an elderly German, irascible in disposition, and profane in speech. His oaths were Teutonic oaths, but were not, on that account, the less thunderous. He taught music and drawing,--those were not the days of specialists,--so all the time that his ears were not vexed with weak and tremulous discords, his eyes were maddened by crippled lines, and sheets of smutty incompetence. The result of such dual strain was that his spirit, which could hardly have been gentle at the outset, had grown savage as a Tartar's. When Christopher North ventured to say that the wasp is the only one of God's creatures perpetually out of temper, it was because he never knew Carlyle or Dr. Eckhart.

This irate old gentleman was an admirable teacher,--or at least he would have been an admirable teacher if we could have enjoyed eternal youth in which to profit by his lessons, to master step by step the deep-laid foundations of an art. As it was, few of us ever got beyond the first feeble paces, beyond those prolonged beginnings which had no significance in our eyes. Yet we knew that other children, children not more richly endowed by nature than we were, made real pictures that, with careful retouching, were deemed worthy of frames, and of places upon parental walls. Adelaide Harrison had a friend who went to a fashionable city school, and who had sent her--in proof of wide attainments--a work of art which filled us with envy and admiration. It was a winter landscape; a thatched cottage with wobbly walls, a bit of fence, and two quite natural-looking trees, all drawn on a prepared surface of blue and brown,--blue on top for the sky, brown underneath for the earth. Then--triumph of realism--this surface was scraped away in spots with a penknife, and the white cardboard thus brought to light presented a startling resemblance to snow,--snow on the cottage roof, snow on the branches of the trees, patches of snow on the ground. It seemed easy to do, and was beautiful when done,--a high order of art, and particularly adapted, by reason of its wintriness, for Christmas gifts. I urged Adelaide to show it to Dr. Eckhart, and to ask him if we might not do something like it, instead of wasting our young lives, and possibly some hidden genius, in futile attempts to draw an uninspiring group of cones and cylinders. Adelaide, who was not without courage, and whose family had a high opinion of her talents, undertook this dangerous commission, and at our next lesson actually proffered her request.

Dr. Eckhart glared like an angry bull. He held the landscape out at arm's length, turning it round and round, as if uncertain which was earth and which was heaven. "And that," he said, indicating with a derisive thumb a spot of white, "what, may I ask, is that?"

"Snow," said Adelaide.

"Snow!" with a harsh cackle. "And do we then scratch in the ground like hens for snow? Eh! tell me that! Like hens?" And he laughed, softened in some measure by an appreciation of his own wit.

Adelaide stood her ground. But she thought it as well to have some one stand by her side. "Agnes wants to do a picture, too," she said.

Dr. Eckhart gasped. If I had intimated a desire to build a cathedral, or write an epic, or be Empress of India, he could not have been more astounded. "L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace." Words failed him, but, reaching over, he picked up my drawing-board, and held it aloft as one might hold a standard; held it rigidly, and contemplated for at least three minutes the wavering outlines of my work. Most of the class naturally looked at it too. The situation was embarrassing, and was made no easier when, after this prolonged exposure, my board was replaced with a thump upon the table, and Dr. Eckhart said in a falsetto imitation of Adelaide's mincing tones: "Agnes wants to do a picture, too." Then without another word of criticism--no more was needed--he moved away, and sat down by Julia Reynolds's side. She alone had never lifted her eyes during this brief episode, had never deemed it worthy of attention. I felt grateful for her unconcern, and yet was humbled by it. It illustrated my sterling insignificance. Nothing that I did, or failed to do, could possibly interest her, even to the raising of an eyelid. At least, so I thought then. I was destined to find out my mistake.

It was through Elizabeth that the new discovery was made. All our inspirations, all the novel features of our life, owed their origin to her. The fertility of her mind was inexhaustible. A few days after this memorable drawing lesson she drew me into a corner at recreation, and, rolling up her sleeve, showed me her arm. There, scratched on the smooth white skin, bloody, unpleasant, and distinct, were the figures 150.

I gazed entranced. A hundred and fifty was Madame Dane's number (the nuns as well as the girls all had numbers), and for months past it had been the emblem of the cult. We never saw it without emotion. When it stood at the head of a page, we always encircled it in a heart. When we found it in our arithmetics, we encircled it in a heart. We marked all our books with these three figures set in a heart, and we cut them upon any wooden substance that came to hand,--not our polished and immaculate desks, but rulers, slate borders, and the swings. And now, happiest of happy devices, Elizabeth had offered her own flesh as a background for these beloved numerals.

The spirit of instant emulation fired my soul. I thought of Julia's number, twenty-one, and burned with desire to carve it monumentally upon myself. "What did you do it with?" I asked.

"A pin, a penknife, and a sharpened match," answered Elizabeth proudly.

I shuddered. These surgical instruments did not invite confidence; but not for worlds would I have acknowledged my distaste. Besides, it is sweet to suffer for those we love. I resolved to out-herod Herod, and use my hand instead of my arm as a commemorative tablet. There was a flamboyant publicity about this device which appealed to my Latin blood.

It did not appeal to Elizabeth, and she offered the practical suggestion that publicity, when one is not a free agent, sometimes entails unpleasant consequences. My arm was, so to speak, my own, and I might do with it what I pleased; but my hand was open to scrutiny, and there was every reason to fear that Madame Dane would disapprove of the inscription. Her arguments were unanswerable, but their very soundness repelled me. I was in no humour for sobriety.

I did the work very neatly that night in my alcove, grateful, before it was over, that there were only two figures in twenty-one. The next day Viola followed my example. I knew she would. There was no escaping from Viola. Tony cut seventy-seven, Ella Holrook's number, upon her arm. Annie Churchill and Lilly heroically cut a hundred and fifty on theirs. The fashion had been set.

In three days half the Second Cours bore upon their suffering little bodies these gory evidences of their love. And for four days no one in authority knew. Yet we spent our time delightfully in examining one another's numerals, and freshening up our own. Like young savages, we incited one another to painful rites, and to bloody excesses. That Viola's hand and mine should for so long have escaped detection seems miraculous; but Madame Dane, though keenly observant, was a trifle near-sighted. She may have thought the scratches accidental.