III
"There are some gypsies on the common, Father."
"Are there, my pet? You and Miss Cleeve had better keep to the road, for the present, then. Very likely they have illness about. Those people are not very careful."
"There was such a thin little boy. He looked as though he didn't get much to eat," said Lily tentatively.
"Well, well, my darling, we'll hope he does. Did you find any blackberries on your walk this morning?"
"Only a few. They're not yet ripe. But, Father——" Lily was ten years old, and nowadays when she saw that her father and mother were deliberately evading a subject upon which she desired information, something that seemed stronger than herself drove her on to urge the point, with an affectation of being unaware of their disapproval.
"Do you think that little boy was really starving, perhaps?"
"No, no, my child." Philip moved uneasily and glanced at his wife. "People don't starve in England nowadays."
"We won't talk about sad things like that, Lily dear," said Eleanor brightly. "People needn't be poor unless they want to, you know. They can always find work."
"Why hasn't everyone got a house then? Why can't that little boy live in a house like we do?" Lily demanded meditatively.
There was a silence weighty with disapproval.
Then Philip remarked simply and with finality:
"Don't ask foolish questions, my little pet."
Lily knew herself defeated and was guiltily conscious of having deserved rebuke by her deliberate pursual of one of the many topics that, for reasons never explained, should not be talked about.
During the year that had elapsed since Vonnie's death, the number of these subjects seemed to have increased enormously. Not only was Vonnie not to be talked about, but anything connected with death, funerals, and mortality generally must be avoided, and it was a general axiom that what Philip occasionally referred to as "sad, painful, distressing things" were never really fit subjects for discussion.
Curiously enough, the nervous sufferings of Lily's whole early childhood, culminating in the emotional crisis that she had undergone when Yvonne died, at this period deserted her. She was now merely sensitive in a petulant way, subconsciously antagonistic to all her surroundings, and obsessed by a resentful certainty that her father and mother did not understand her.
This ungracious conviction she once haltingly attempted to explain to Eleanor, early faced with the endeavour that has defeated so many, that of avoiding the only form of words obviously designed to express what she wished to have understood, and finding instead some other formula in which it might be conveyed with equal lucidity and yet less outspokenness.
The results were a number of self-contradictory statements from Lily, followed by tears.
"But what is it that I don't understand, my baby?" Eleanor urged her to return to the attack.
"Me," quavered Lily, suddenly explicit.
Her mother winced very visibly indeed.
Lily felt unutterably naughty.
"My dearest," said Eleanor at last, "how can a grown-up person not understand a little child? You're talking nonsense, you know. There can be nothing in a little girl of ten years old that's beyond the understanding of a grown-up, experienced person. And to say that a mother doesn't understand her own child, is to suggest something that can't possibly be. Some day you'll know what I mean."
"When?" said Lily.
Eleanor's absolute belief in the creed that she had enunciated perforce carried a certain conviction to Lily's bewildered and undeveloped mind.
"When?" she repeated.
"When you have a little child of your own," her mother replied simply.
There was nothing more to be said.
Until that far-away, unbelievable time when one would be sufficiently old to have a little child of one's own, it must be taken on trust that all grown-up people, especially one's father and mother, understood one perfectly, although they made one feel all the time as though they did not.
Lily's thoughts and her feelings became speedily more and more muddled and confused.
Her discontent, which originated in sheer perplexity, took the form of argumentative and tiresome contradiction of the rules imposed upon her.
"She used to be such a dear, little sunny thing," cried Eleanor piteously. "Of course, I know there's an awkward age for all children to go through but I never thought of Lily's beginning it so young."
She cried and looked pale over Lily's naughtiness very often, and Lily was tortured by remorse and self-accusations that were without any effect upon her behaviour.
One day her father, who was tacitly supposed to know of her naughtiness, but to find it too grievous to be mentioned openly, spoke to her.
"You will regret it bitterly later on, my child, if you grieve your mother just now. There are reasons which you can't understand why she should be spared in every possible way, at present."
Were these specific reasons, or only the usual mysterious ones held over one's head by the authorities, and generally supposed to have obscure reference to God?
Lily presently came to the conclusion that some definite event was impending, and that she was supposed to know nothing whatever about it. Things were said to her of which it was obvious that she was intended to make general application only, and to which, with intuitive certainty, she instantly attached a special meaning.
"You must always be a very good little girl to your mother, and pray to God that He may take good care of her."
Why should Father suddenly say that, when it was an old-established certainty that Lily knew she ought to be a good little girl, and had prayed for her mother every night ever since she could remember, as a matter of course?
Sometimes it almost seemed as though they wanted to see how far it was possible for them to go, before Lily would make any sign of having noticed that there was a mystery.
"Nurse, I want you to bring those things that I spoke to you about into my room this morning."
"Yes, madam."
And then five minutes later:
"My little Lily must stay in the schoolroom and do her lessons very nicely this morning, and not go running about the house too much. Trot along to Miss Cleeve, my pet."
As though Miss Cleeve had ever dreamed of allowing Lily to run about the house during lesson time! Such a thing was quite unheard of, and Eleanor's casual tone did not for an instant deceive Lily into supposing that the prohibition had been a casual one.
On another occasion, a still more careless enquiry:
"You know you must never come into upstairs rooms without knocking at the door first, don't you, darling?"
A rule that Lily had known and had been made to observe, since she was three years old.
It appeared, therefore, that there was some urgent necessity for enforcing the rule now. Lily discovered that the door of the Blue Room was locked, all of a sudden.
She felt a strange inability to question her father or mother, but she tried to entrap Miss Cleeve into an admission, unconsciously imitating the air of carelessness with which Eleanor had tried, as Lily dimly felt, to entrap her into asking some question, to which a reply might be given that would direct curiosity into an innocuous channel leading nowhere.
"Oh, Miss Cleeve! Did you know the door of the Blue Room had been locked?"
Lily gave a high-pitched, nervous giggle. "Perhaps the key's been lost!"
Miss Cleeve threw her a very sharp glance of which Lily pretended to be quite unaware.
"Really, dear," she said in a very even voice. "Keys sometimes are lost, you know. But there's nothing to take you to the Blue Room, that I know of."
"Nurse goes in there sometimes. I've seen her coming out."
"I daresay she likes to see that it's kept dusted and tidy," said Miss Cleeve, in a preternaturally calm voice. "Now run and wash your hands for lunch, dear."
Lily felt thoroughly baffled by Miss Cleeve, and could not decide whether or not the governess had penetrated the motive of her artless enquiries.
Because she felt ashamed of her own attempts at solving the mystery that was in the air, she was sure that she was being naughty again.
When she went downstairs to the dining-room, her mother and Miss Cleeve were already there, talking in furtive tones to one another. Eleanor broke off the instant that Lily appeared and looked at her in rather a startled way, but Miss Cleeve, with the same determined naturalness with which she had spoken upstairs, uttered her final remark quite loud:
"So I thought perhaps a word to the wise, Mrs. Stellenthorpe——"
"Quite right, Miss Cleeve, thank you. I shall take care. Anyway it won't be very long now before——"
They both looked at Lily, who suddenly felt so uncomfortable that, to cover her own confusion, she almost involuntarily cried out: "Before what, Mother?"
Her mother and Miss Cleeve exchanged glances in a way that made Lily feel unutterably small and foolish and ignorant.
To her deep mortification, she felt her face burning with angry scarlet, although without knowing why.
"Poor little thing!" said Eleanor, and actually laughed, causing all Lily's inchoate disconcertment to culminate in a silent, furious resolution, that never again would she ask any of them about anything, so long as she lived.
The impassioned, childishly formed determination was not of a nature to endure. The inexplicable resentment that had caused it, Lily never forgot.
She could not have told what sudden intuition first made her suspect the truth, but when Eleanor, with certain circumlocutions and euphemistic phrases, told her that she might pray to God to send her a baby brother, Lily felt that she had known all the time that this was what all the mystery had been about.
"It's a great secret and you mustn't talk about it to anyone," Eleanor whispered.
Lily had no wish to talk about it to anyone. She was by that time thoroughly convinced that the arrival of a baby was something necessitating endless concealments and misrepresentations, and therefore of a highly shameful nature.
She was sent away to the seaside with Miss Cleeve for nearly six weeks, and when they came back again, the little brother was established in a blue and white cradle, and the Blue Room had been unlocked and transformed into a night nursery.
Lily gathered from various things that the servants said, that her mother had been ill, and that the illness was in some manner connected with the baby's coming. The subject puzzled her, and troubled her thoughts very often, but she felt sure that it was wrong to desire enlightenment, and she knew that if she asked questions she would receive either jocular or untrue replies, or the shocked "Hush!" of enforced reticence.
Eleanor having a horror of pet animals, from which she feared the contraction of mysterious and unspecified diseases of the skin, Lily was safeguarded from any direct encounter with the crudities of Nature. Her imagination therefore continued to evolve theories and explanations that her common-sense rejected, but that frightened and distressed her none the less, and that sent her furtively in quest of the information which she believed to be illicit, to such forbidden books of reference as the "Encyclopædia Britannica."
After Kenneth was born, Lily, to her unconscious relief, ceased to be the sole object in life of her parents, her governess, and her nurse. She spent less time in the drawing-room, and after Miss Cleeve had left for the day, remained in the schoolroom and read endlessly.
"Not too many story-books, my little darling," Eleanor occasionally said with a hint of disapproval in her tones, but as the books in the schoolroom were all story-books, and she was not allowed to touch the ones in the drawing-room, Lily continued to indulge her taste for fiction, although with the usual underlying feeling of guilt that seemed automatically to attach itself to whatever was pleasant.
There were curious nuances, never put into words, as that to read a new story-book was more reprehensible than to re-read an old one, and even when a recent birthday had occasioned the arrival of some delightful blue or red volume, the very giver of it might be apt to exclaim, with a sound of vexation, on seeing Lily immersed in it:
"Another new story-book!"
Lily grew to be so apprehensive of these expressions of disapproval that sometimes she slipped the new book, with its incriminating, shining binding, into one of the brown paper covers that concealed the wear and tear of the old books.
This manœuvre was one day penetrated by Miss Cleeve, who did not seek any explanation of it, but merely told Lily on general grounds that she was a most sly child, and didn't seem to know the meaning of the word "honour."
Lily wept and felt that it was true.
Gradually she came to consider her passion for reading as another sign of her own depravity, much confirmed in this view by the grave pronouncements of her father, who said to her from time to time:
"Dear child, you know you don't want to have your little nose buried in a story-book at every spare moment."
It was the question of buying sweets, all over again. Certain propensities, for reasons never specified, were evidently so undesirable that the existence of them might not even be admitted. One was told that one didn't want to do such things, and all the time was conscious of wanting to do them very much indeed.
Evidently, such desires must never be openly admitted.
The atmosphere became more and more charged with concealments, as time revealed more and more of the complexities of life.
When Kenneth was nearly a year old, he caught scarlet fever. The infection was in the village. Miss Cleeve succumbed, and Eleanor, panic-stricken, sent Lily away by herself for the first time in her life.
It was expressly explained that she was not going to school. No. There would never be any question of that. Lily was simply going to a beautiful peaceful convent, not at all far away, where she would be very happy with the kind Sisters and play with the pupils.
The scheme was Eleanor's. She had an ideal, totally unbased upon experience, of a convent school, that was of an extreme and highly sentimental picturesqueness. In her mind's eye, mild-faced nuns paced perpetually up and down a garden, and innocent children, in a more or less permanent state of preparing for their première Communion, were instructed in the arts of music and embroidery and ancienne politesse française.
She combated Philip's strong objections to letting Lily go within the sphere of Catholic influence.
"It isn't as though she were older," Eleanor urged. "She's only a baby, Philip. And it will be for such a little while. Please God, we can have her home again by Christmas."
It was really the last argument that had most weight with Philip, and the desire that his wife's mind should be at ease about their darling.
Neither had the slightest conception of the utter unfitness for any form of independence in which they had brought up their child.
Philip himself took her to the convent, emphatically telling her in the presence of the Mother Superior that she must always say her prayers night and morning just as she had been taught them, and that she was not to think of herself as having been sent to school.
The reiteration of this last axiom rather disappointed Lily. It sounded much more grown up and like other girls to be sent to school, and school, according to many story-books, was an exciting place where one distinguished oneself easily and made interesting friendships and learnt to play games.
Lily was afraid that a convent might prove to be a very tame affair, by comparison. In effect, she never did learn to play games there, since the only one in vogue—a complicated system of running about wildly in the playground from one chalk-mark to another, called The Rescue of the Holy City from the Infidels—proved beyond her comprehension from the first to the last day of her stay.
Nor did she make interesting friendships, because any friendships at all were entirely forbidden and rendered impossible by a quantity of rules that were enforced by perpetual surveillance. Neither did she distinguish herself, excepting by the unprecedented number of humiliating and babyish mistakes that she seemed to be perpetually making.
Lily, for the first time in her life thrown amongst other children, heard from their unsparing lips various brutal truths about herself: She was a most frightful baby for her age.
Anybody could see that she'd been made a regular spoilt child of at home.
It was most awfully affected, the way she was always using grown-up words.
It was simply silly, always to get red and cry at the least little bit of chaff.
It was perfectly indecent to wear such a disgustingly short frock—the nuns said so.
Lily was only too thankful to exchange her brief velveteen skirts for a blue serge uniform dress, that flapped against her ankles and of which the collar-band scratched her neck.
But even the uniform did not save her from committing other outrages upon propriety, hitherto unsuspected. A brand-new category of sins sprang into being, all of them classed under the heading of Immodesty—a word that Lily had never heard mentioned before.
Legs were particularly immodest. To show them, to cross one of them over the other, to mention them by name, was all highly immodest. So was any allusion to any part of the human anatomy below the shoulder-blades.
There was an uneasy suggestion that it might at any moment become immodest to talk about any male creature other than a priest, the convent gardener, or one's own father. Even brothers seemed to be better left out of the conversation.
The hideous immodesty latent in the taking of a bath could only be defeated by a cold, shroud-like garment of white calico, that fastened just above the wearer's collar-bone, was buttoned at the wrists, and fell in folds to the ground.
A bath, accompanied by a bath-chemise, was in readiness for each pupil once a week.
Lily jumped trustfully into her first bath at the convent, pleased at finding that she was expected to take it without supervision, which she had never done before, got out again very quickly upon the discovery that the water, on a dank November day, was nearly cold, and dried herself imperfectly in the chilly amplitude of the bath-chemise, which she supposed to be a towel of a new kind. The same afternoon a scandalized nun enquired whether Lily was in the habit of taking a bath "without wearing anything?"
"All naked? Yes," said Lily, nodding assent.
Then it appeared that not only was her practice immodest, but so was her language. The nun was not at all angry, she was very kind, but the vicarious shame that she quite obviously felt on Lily's behalf, remained unforgettable.
The affair could only be classed with Lily's other great outrage against decency, which was never destined to pass altogether from her memory.
The first time that she fell ill at the convent, which she did with the rapidity of a very much over-coddled child suddenly bereft of even ordinary supervision in the affairs of the body, Lily was sent to the Infirmary. She had fainted during breakfast.
"Poor little dear! You shall go to bed at once," said the kind old Sister in charge. "Where's your dressing-gown, dear?"
"In the dormitory."
"Then I'll fetch it for you. Get ready for bed as fast as you can."
Lily, interpreting this literally, made every speed in divesting herself of her clothes, forgetful that her night-gown was not lying waiting on the newly made Infirmary bed.
But the Sister would bring it, she decided, and sat close to the comfortable blaze of the Infirmary fire. Only a diminutive vest inadequately concealed her from the appalled gaze of the returning nun. Lily found herself enshrouded in both night-gown and dressing-gown on the instant, and directed to get into bed.
The nun was very forbearing, and only said, when the first shock had passed:
"A modest little girl would never have done that. What can your poor guardian angel have thought?"
The Protestant Lily, however, was less concerned with the hypothetical embarrassment of her guardian angel, than with this new view of herself as a little girl lacking in modesty.
She was homesick while she was at the convent, and a good deal bullied by her contemporaries, nevertheless the discipline was of a more wholesome kind than any she had yet known, and the total absence of any real element of education in the teaching that she received was partially compensated by the nuns' conscientious observance of Philip's prohibitions, and the amount of dogmatical religious instruction that she thereby escaped.
She might even have profited by the three months she spent at school, if it had been the conventual habit to pay any slightest regard to the more modern laws of hygiene.
Lily was not naturally a practical child, although she possessed a certain fundamental common-sense, and a precocious ability to profit by experience once acquired. Certain simple hygienic practices of which the regular observance had been enjoined upon her at home, without any explanation as to the necessity for them, she had acquiesced in blindly as a matter of course, without the slightest realization of the fact that they were connected with the preservation of her bodily welfare.
As the extreme modesty enjoined by the nuns did not permit of any supervision in such matters, even as regarded the youngest of the children in their charge, a state of affairs naturally followed that resulted in the very rapid deterioration of Lily's health.
Moreover, there prevailed at the convent, as at the very large majority of European educational establishments, the monstrous custom of curtailing the amount of sleep required for the proper development of growing youth.
Lily, although, like the other junior pupils, she was seldom in bed before nine o'clock, suffered less than they did—and very much less than the seniors, young girls all more or less at a stage of physical and mental development that made the utmost demand upon each one's constitution. Lily, at all events, need not obey the clamorous bell that summoned the school at a quarter to six every morning, in order that all might be assembled in the chapel by half-past six. She remained in bed until it became imperative to get up, dress herself—a task that she had not been allowed to perform unaided hitherto, and to which she was consequently highly inadequate—wash herself with an equal absence of thoroughness, partly because she was unaccustomed to ice-cold water, and partly because it was immodest to unfasten one's night-gown before various garments had been shuffled on underneath it—and then join the other children, who had now been fasting for more than an hour, for breakfast.
The food they were given was abundant, although inferior in quality, and completely lacking in variety. Each day of the week had its appointed menu, which was never departed from.
Sweets and chocolates were permitted only on Sundays, when, to equalize distribution and encourage generosity, the assembled gastronomical wealth of the establishment was placed upon the long tables of the refectory at dinner-time. No favouritism was permitted, so that each box or dish must be sent the length of the table by its owner, each of whose fellow-pupils would accept one specimen of the contents.
Naturally, the abstention of the week enhanced the necessity for profiting to the full by the plethora of Sunday, and Lily was not the only child who, when the day of rest and plenty was over, wished miserably, and for more than one reason, that Sunday privileges were allowed to extend over the cheerlessness of the week.
Philip came once to see his daughter, and was dismayed, without altogether knowing why, at her appearance when she was sent to him in the parlour.
The many inches of additional skirt by which the convent authorities had striven to obliterate the recollection of Lily's original display of brown stocking, made her look absurdly tall and thin, and her hands and little, slim wrists seemed to have grown bony.
Philip, scrutinizing her face anxiously, decided that she had lost some of her colour and that there certainly were black rings round her eyes. Her hair seemed to be in need of brushing.
To his enquiries, Lily replied, after the fashion of almost all children, that nothing was the matter. Yes, she liked the convent.
Had anyone been talking to her about religion? No, she didn't think so.
This relieved Philip's chief personal anxiety on Lily's behalf, and after cautioning her gently upon the use of slang and the care of her hands, he bade her say her little prayers every day, and be a very good child, and said that he hoped she would be home by Christmas.
He went away inexplicably depressed.
Eleanor instantly felt the weight of that depression, but as Philip had seriously resolved that his wife must, for her own good, be subjected to no further anxiety whilst the little boy continued ill, he gave her a hollow and unsmiling account, which he made as brief as possible, of Lily's welfare and happiness. It would have been quite impossible to Eleanor to receive a statement of her husband's at any but its face value.
She pretended, even to herself, that she believed Philip's account, and only cried in the middle of the night, telling herself that it was because she was over-tired.
Whether or not this last was the cause of her weeping, it was certainly a fact.
With quite irrational self-immolation, she had refused to entrust the care of Kenneth to a trained nurse, and devoted herself to him day and night in a veritable orgy of maternal sacrifice.
Kenneth recovered, although probably less rapidly than he would have done under professional care, and Eleanor fell ill.
She had the fever very slightly, but after a time, she tentatively asked that Lily should be sent for from the convent.
"I must see her once more, Philip."
It was entirely characteristic of Eleanor Stellenthorpe that with all her impassioned idolatry of her favourite child, it never occurred to her that she might spare Lily's sensitive youth an emotional scene such as the one of farewell that she contemplated.
But Philip, although heavy with the sense of impending calamity, and the spoken weight of an unfavourable medical verdict, was incapable of abandoning his life-long endeavour to alter the nature of painful facts by dint of refusing to acknowledge them.
"Don't talk like that, Eleanor dearest," he begged her. "It sounds just a little morbid, and of course you'll be well again by Christmas."
Accordingly, nothing distressing was put into words, and Philip and Eleanor, neither of them inwardly deceived by their spoken denial of despondency, suffered separately and in silence.
For two days before she died, Eleanor was unconscious, but it was not until after her death that Philip said, with heart-broken sincerity:
"I gave up hope from the moment she fell ill. From the first, I really knew that she would never get well again."
IV
Philip did not want to send Lily to school. He and his wife had been at one upon this point. He regretted even the three months that she had spent at the convent, although he remarked at intervals for long afterwards that a girls' school and a convent were not at all the same thing.
"Besides, my little pet, you were only there for a month or two, and you were not at all well when you came away. It wasn't at all a success."
"But that was years ago," Lily protested. "I should like it very much, now, or best of all if only you would send me to a proper school, Father."
For nearly four years, ever since her mother's death, she had asked at intervals to be sent to school.
At first, Philip had answered her with a sort of mournful playfulness.
"What! Doesn't my little girl get enough lessons at home? We must talk to Miss Cleeve, and see if she can't manage an extra hour or two on Saturday afternoons—shall we, Lily?"
The Lily of ten and eleven years old had dutifully pretended amusement, and thought herself naughty for the inward pang that she experienced at being treated like a baby.
A year later, she was far more openly rebellious.
"It's so very dull doing lessons all alone, Father."
"If God had spared us our poor little Yvonne, you would not have to do them alone," said Philip, the allusion, in some mysterious way, having exactly the effect of a merited rebuke.
Lily immediately, and quite irrationally, felt that she had been heartless.
"Besides," continued her father, pressing the advantage that he perceived himself to have gained, although without quite knowing how, "you don't want to break up our poor little home-party any further, my child, do you? You and I and poor little Kenneth are all that are left now, you know."
Lily was silenced, although, dimly, she knew that she had been unfairly defeated. What he said was true—she cried herself to sleep at the thought of it sometimes—but her powers of clear thinking had been too thoroughly obscured for her to analyze the illogical attitude taken up by her father, who from time to time said, with the most obvious sincerity:
"Poor little children! How can I do anything for them? She made home, and now that she and little Yvonne are gone, there is nothing left but sadness and emptiness. I have no wish whatever to live, but it must be as God Almighty wills."
"It couldn't make any difference to him if I went to school," Lily reflected resentfully, after Philip had thus once more put in words the utter despondency that hung always over him.
By the time that Lily was fourteen, there was scarcely anything left of the pride and the species of doting affection that her father had displayed during her early childhood. His ideal of a happy home had been rudely shattered by Eleanor's death, and he attributed the signs of Lily's inevitable development to a lack of veneration for her mother's memory. He was honestly incapable of perceiving that, if Eleanor had lived, conflict of the most irreconcilable kind must have arisen between her and Lily.
He dumbly and piteously resented Lily's incoherent attempts at self-expression, her struggling efforts to evolve her own personality in the midst of a stultifying atmosphere, with much the same blind sentimentality that he regretted the lost, blue-eyed prettiness of her baby days and the unescapable certainty that she was grown too tall to sit upon his knee.
Her continual requests to be sent to school distressed him profoundly. At one and the same time, he saw Lily convicted of disloyalty in wishing to alter the routine of life instituted for her by her mother, and as heartlessly desirous of abandoning her lonely father and little brother in their changed and saddened home.
At last he said to her:
"I can stand this no longer. Go, Lily, but remember that God Himself will condemn those who blaspheme against the sacred love of father and mother. You can go. I will keep no child at home against its will."
His face was drawn and grey with suffering, as he looked at the child who seemed to him to be growing up devoid of heart. Only the extremity of pain and disappointment would have made him speak so and Lily realized it.
She broke into terrified sobs, and saw herself with his eyes.
Both were shaken by the sense of an immense issue involved. The question had acquired a monstrous and devastating magnitude. Only the shamed and stifled, but still living, sense of proportion in Lily's soul, that warned her how bitterly she would, later, regret the folly of yielding to a sentimental impulse, prevented her from exclaiming that she never, never wanted to leave home as long as she lived.
An almost intolerable period of tension followed. The gloom of Philip Stellenthorpe became abysmal. Only little four-year-old Kenneth appeared to be cheerfully insensible to it.
Undaunted by his father's weighty tenderness, that was in itself an advertisement of melancholy, Kenneth continued to play with his toys, to shout for bread-and-jam with his tea, and to wriggle unconcernedly away when his father would have lifted him to Lily's old post of honour on the parental knee.
Kenneth was far from being the motherless baby boy of fiction. He evinced no special affection for anyone, and was quite unaffectedly impenitent when sins, that had once been the cause of heart-searching remorse to Lily and Yvonne, were pointed out to him with sorrowful gravity. Although only ten years separated them, Kenneth was in fact the modern child that Lily had never been allowed to become.
She watched him with more awe than affection, sometimes. He seemed to be a hard little boy.
The next phase of Lily Stellenthorpe's education was inaugurated by the astonishing announcement of Miss Cleeve, that she was going to be married and must go away.
"The old order changeth," said Philip, in tones of bewildered pain.
He gave Miss Cleeve a munificent wedding present, and reflected that yet another link with the past was breaking.
To look for another governess for Lily seemed to him an appalling task. His conscience would not have allowed him to depute it to his sister Clothilde, for ever since the fulfilment of her pronouncement that Vonnie would not live to grow up, Philip had steadily assured himself that poor Clo's judgments were not to be trusted.
Such is the curious effect produced by a prophet whose word has been too well verified in his own country.
Philip, like all sentimentalists, preferred asking advice to taking it. He decided to consult Eleanor's cousin and nearest surviving relative, unconsciously reserving to himself the right of finding that, after all, poor Charlie Hardinge was not a very sympathetic fellow, and held very little sacred, and that his counsels could not be worthy of serious consideration.
Besides the fact of his relationship—of potent weight with Philip—Charlie Hardinge was further qualified as adviser, in being the father of three little girls. The little girls, however, and Ethel their mother, had only been seen by the Stellenthorpes at rare intervals.
Charlie himself was in the habit of staying with them for two nights on his way to and from the north of England, in the course of every year. He always brought the children presents, and Philip always said in advance, nervously: "You must thank Cousin Charlie very nicely if he is kind enough to bring you a little present of chocolates, but you'll keep them downstairs in the drawing-room, like good children, won't you?"
He had never been able to forget altogether that Charlie Hardinge had once expressed injudicious surprise at the decorous restraint that prevailed over the distribution of sweets presented to the Stellenthorpe children.
Unconsciously, he liked Charlie much better in esse than in posse, and found even his exuberant habit of repeating everything he said three or four times over merely an ebullition of warm-hearted earnestness.
"Now, now, now, now," said Charlie. "You want some suggestion about this kiddie of yours—your Lily. I understand perfectly. What are you to do with her—fourteen, isn't she? Fourteen—yes—fourteen. Now, our Dorothy isn't fourteen yet, and Janet and Sylvia, of course, are younger still. Sylvia is just ten, in fact. You know they've just gone to school at Bridgecrap?"
"No," said Philip, startled. "I had no idea of it. I always supposed that you and Ethel meant to educate them at home."
His terrible fear of any unpleasantness made him hesitate, and feel unable to say, as he had meant to say, that he disapproved of girls' schools altogether.
"Well, it was a sacrifice," Hardinge admitted with a sigh. "A sacrifice. But we felt that it was for the kiddies' own good. No brother, you see. They wanted to be taught how to take chaff, and ragging, and teasing—that's what they wanted—they wanted to get thoroughly well teased. Now your Lily, my dear fellow—very pretty kiddie-widdie, mind you, beautifully mannered, and I'm only saying this because I'm fond of her—your kiddie doesn't know how to take a joke. I noticed it this evening, when I was chaffing her a little about holding herself so badly. That's another thing she wants—drilling. Drilling, drilling!"
Charlie hit himself a resounding blow on the chest.
"She wants drilling!"
"She is tall for her age," said Philip, who considered personal remarks ill-bred, unless complimentary.
"So's my Dorothy," Hardinge inexorably returned. "Now, how tall is your kiddie? How tall exactly?"
"I really don't know, but she is certainly taller than most children of fourteen. In fact the governess, before she left, told me that Lily was outgrowing her strength."
"Our Dorothy is thirteen and a half and stands five-foot five in her stockings. Five-foot five, and a back like a ramrod. Now, Lily isn't five-foot five, I'm positive of that. We'll measure her to-morrow, and you'll find she's not five-foot five. Nowhere near it."
Philip made a politely acquiescent sound.
"Drilling is what she wants, drilling and games. It's done everything in the world for my kiddie-widdies. Little Sylvia, now, didn't hold herself as well as the other two—was rather inclined to poke. And after one term at Bridgecrap she's holding her head up, and her shoulders back, and talks of nothing but hockey."
Philip suppressed a shudder at a consummation which appeared to him so utterly undesirable.
"You must send Lily to Bridgecrap," said Charlie Hardinge positively. "No place like it. Splendid air—right up above the sea, outdoor games all the year round—swimming and gym—everything you can think of."
"Who is the lady in charge?"
"A splendid woman—splendid woman. Miss Melody—Monica Melody. You've heard of her, of course—took a university degree, and has written some very sound stuff about education. Mind you, I sounded her very carefully before I sent the kiddies. Ethel and I had really had no idea of sending them to school at all—but they were keen to go. It was their own idea—Dorothy started it."
Philip almost groaned.
"I can hardly understand the idea of young children who actually want to leave home," he said, considerably understating his case.
"Your kiddie-widdie wants to go to school too, eh?" said Charlie acutely. "I thought so. I thought so now, I thought so. You take it all too seriously, my dear fellow, far too seriously. It's very natural, you know. My little girliekins had one another, after all, but Lily hasn't a soul—not a soul of her own age."
"This is a lonely place, as you know," said Philip stiffly. "There are no girls of her own age within a reasonable distance."
"Well, are there any boys then, any boys?"
"Boys?"
"Boys—boys of her own age. Boys, boys, boys. If there are no girls for the poor kiddie to play with, I suppose she must play with boys."
Philip rose from his chair and made elaborate examination of a slightly smoking lamp.
By the time that he had meticulously adjusted it, he was able to turn round and speak with calm.
"I shouldn't like my little Lily to become a tomboy. She is quite happy in her own little nursery."
"Now, what's the good of talking as though she were still a baby? She's not a baby—you really must make up your mind to it, my dear chap, that the kiddie isn't a baby any longer."
Philip was quite incapable of making up his mind to anything of the sort, but by sheer force of iteration Charlie Hardinge succeeded in accustoming his mind to the possibility of sending Lily to Bridgecrap.
To Lily's dismay, almost as much as to Philip's own, Charlie asked her in her father's presence:
"Wouldn't you like to go to school, little woman, where my kiddie-widdies are? You've often heard of my Dorothy, now, haven't you? and she's always asking about you. They're all three of them at school at Bridgecrap now, as happy as the day is long. You'd like to go to school, wouldn't you?"
Lily cast a hasty glance at her father. His eyes did not meet hers, but she knew the profoundly dejected droop of his head, and was acutely sensitive to the meaning of his silence.
The atmosphere in which she and her father lived—of perpetually wounded susceptibilities, of suppressed verities, of only half-sincere demonstrations, continued long after they had ceased to be spontaneous—had made of Lily a super-sensitive, unbalanced creature, distrustful of her own instincts, and almost incapable of clear thinking. She had become the victim of muddle, the commonest and the most disastrous foundation upon which to build up a life.
It now seemed to her that it would be impossible to speak the truth in the face of the obvious pain that it would give her father, while at the same time she was aware of the utter uselessness of telling a lie. To tell a lie, incidentally, was a sin, but then so was it a sin to be heartless and undutiful, and the latter was fraught with the more painful consequences of the two.
Good-natured Charlie Hardinge saw, without understanding it, the conflict reflected on her small, pale face.
"Come, come, come, come! You look as though school would do you all the good in the world. My kiddies have got cheeks like roses, and Dorothy holds herself like a grenadier—head up, shoulders back! They think Bridgecrap the jolliest place in the world."
"Is it a large school?" asked Lily, evading the point at issue with absolute relief.
"Thirty girls. Miss Melody has some very nice kiddies there indeed—girls you're likely to see something of, later on. Very nice girls—girls that Ethel and I thoroughly liked the look of. Walk well, hold themselves well, keen on all sorts of games——"
It might be said that Philip eventually sent Lily to Bridgecrap in spite of Charlie Hardinge's recommendations, rather than because of them.
The thing that really moved him most, although he was quite unaware that it was the determining factor in his decision, was Charlie's positive assurance that Lily was losing her prettiness.
"The kiddie's pale," said Charlie accusingly. "She used to have a pretty colour when she was a little thing, and now she looks anæmic—and there are lines under her eyes. She's moping, Philip, that's what it is. Moping. No wonder she holds herself so badly!"
Philip did not like hearing strictures, that he could not feel to be altogether without foundation, upon the appearance of his daughter.
It cost him real and severe pain to let her go, although her presence at home gave him no happiness, and he did not attempt to conceal the extent of his sacrifice from Lily.
"Good-bye, my poor little girl. You shall have your own way, and go right away from home for a time. I hope it may answer, my poor child, and send you back some day to those who love you best in the world. God bless you."
This was Philip's valediction, sending Lily to her new surroundings with a leaden weight of guilt at her heart, and a reproachful picture of a sorrowful and deserted father returning to an empty house.
Having more or less lost hold upon her own convictions, she felt that, had it been possible, she would gladly have renounced Bridgecrap for ever, and returned to her father.
In this frame of mind, and with spirit encompassed by the accumulation of false values that had steadily been put before her in one form or another by the two small worlds that she had known—her home and the convent—it may readily be assumed that Lily began her career at Bridgecrap school under a severe handicap.
The standards there were altogether different from any that she had known yet.
"Honour" seemed to be the watchword of the place. The girls who excelled in games, or in examinations, did so "for the honour of the school." Their own personal honour was appealed to, freely and frequently. The convent system of surveillance would have been unthinkable, at Bridgecrap.
"I want you girls to have just the Public School code of honour that your brothers have——" Miss Melody herself often rousingly remarked.
But although the Bridgecrap girls were to play games like boys, to hold the traditional boys' views about honour, and, theoretically, to receive an education that should as nearly as possible conform to the pattern of that bestowed upon their brothers, they were never for a moment allowed to view the masculine sex as the superior sex. On the contrary, there was nothing, they were told, that a man could do which a woman could not do better. The old idea that women were not fitted for the professions that had hitherto been closed to them was being disproved every day. Miss Melody hoped to see many of her girls take their degrees, strike out careers for themselves....
Many of the girls responded enthusiastically, although the majority of them belonged to a class of society in which careers, other than that of matrimony, are scarcely yet tolerated for its daughters; and seldom contemplated by them, schooldays once over. They were enthusiastic, although they did not realize it, largely because of the excellent physical conditions under which they lived.
Games were played all the year round, at Bridgecrap. There was an elaborate gymnasium, and once a week the girls went to the swimming-baths. Lily was good-naturedly despised by them all for her absolute lack of athletic training or proficiency and total absence of muscle.
Just as at ten years old she had heard the opinion of her contemporaries at the convent, and been humiliated by it, so at Bridgecrap she met with an equal candour, clothed in the slang that was tolerated, if not actually permitted, from the pupils.
"Look here, Lily Thingamy, or whatever your name is, you'll have to stir your stumps a bit. Can't hold a whole hockey practice up for you, you know."
"Just look at this kid! Why, she hasn't any more muscle than a kitten. If she weren't so thin, she'd be disgustingly flabby!"
"You want backbone, that's what you want. It makes one sick to see anybody of your age who's never been taught what ragging means."
"My dear kid, it's no use saying you don't know the rules of the game. You've bally well got to know them. What on earth do you know, if you don't know anything about cricket?"
There were things that Lily did know, although she speedily became aware that the knowledge of them would not bring her to honour or triumph amongst the girls, and scarcely even amongst the mistresses. It was not accounted as particularly creditable to her, for instance, that she took a high place in the school, and retained it easily. More might have been made of it, but for the fact that all Miss Cleeve's conscientious teaching had never embraced the form of cramming known as taking examinations, and at Bridgecrap the taking of examinations was made the test of knowledge.
Consequently, however excellent her half year's work, Lily seldom succeeded in passing a test, to the form of which she was unaccustomed, and the lists were regularly headed by the captain of the hockey team, who had been at Bridgecrap nearly six years, possessed a capacity for hard work, a well-trained, mechanical memory, and no intellect whatever.
The mistresses were almost all primarily selected for their proficiency in games, except the French teacher, a Swiss lady who gave all her lessons in broken English.
The Scripture classes were taken by Miss Melody herself, in each of the three divisions of the school. History was imparted in the usual patchwork of dates, anecdotes, and names famous in Great Britain between the reign of King Alfred the Great and that of Queen Anne, geography was not taught beyond the Upper Third, botany was an extra, natural history ignored, and plain needlework not taught. Mathematics, except in the cases of one or two peculiarly constituted beings, presented itself to the girls, as to the majority of feminine minds, as a compound of meaningless "sums" that, if juggled with by a series of unrelated processes, might "come out right" at the end. Those of the pupils, Lily Stellenthorpe amongst them, who had least liking or aptitude for figures, received, by way of inculcating these, an hour's private and extra tuition in arithmetic once a week. Almost each one of them still surreptitiously counted upon her fingers, as little children do, believing it to be a form of cheating, but entirely unfamiliar with any more legitimate method of achieving the same result.
Literature, kept within the realms of English achievement, generally embraced one Shakespearean play thoroughly prepared, out of a school edition, for a coming examination. Shakespearean plays not judged suitable for this purpose, many of the girls did not even know by name. A few had "read Scott, because my young brother had to swot up 'Woodstock' last hols." Scarcely one could connect the name of any classic with that of its author, and all, without exception, would have felt heartily ashamed of being found, under no form of compulsion, to be reading poetry.
Few, it may be added, ran any such risk.
The religious principles of the school were Church of England, but religion, to Lily's relief, did not imply the insistent advertisement of outward and minor pieties that had prevailed at the convent.
A short daily service was held in the school chapel, and there were prayers morning and evening. Miss Melody held "Sunday talks" for the elder girls, of which the prevalent notes were brightness and broad-mindedness. Free discussions of Bible and Catechism readings were encouraged, with implicit avoidance of certain of the Commandments which apparently were not fit subjects for explanation.
Indeed, the nuns themselves could have displayed no more silent and resolute modesty than prevailed at Bridgecrap upon subjects that, sooner or later, must become of vital moment to every one of the feminine creatures there being educated.
V
Lily formed and retained a very acute impression of the Bridgecrap atmosphere, during the three years that she spent there, but hardly a single personality in the place made any lasting effect upon her memory. Yet it was during those three years that a secret and shamed conviction slowly crystallized within her; they were all what she inwardly called Real Live People, and she herself was only a sham. However much she might try to be like everyone else, sooner or later they would find her out.
She could not have explained wherein lay the difference, but connected it vaguely with a mysterious undercurrent of romance that ran through her daily life, and of which no one must ever, ever know.
She thought that no one but herself ever invented long, dramatic stories, that went on from day to day, in which one traversed strange and eventful scenes, always a heroine, always becomingly dressed, and always in full view of a selected audience.
Lily also supposed herself, with more reason, to be unique in another respect.
At fifteen, even at sixteen years of age, she still liked playing with toys. Not even such respectable toys as jig-saw puzzles, or ingenious mechanical contrivances—although even such tastes as these must have roused the extreme of scorn in the players of hockey—but terribly, shamefully babyish things—wooden farmyards and tea sets and dolls.
Above all, dolls.
Officially, Lily had outgrown dolls at twelve years old. Miss Cleeve had expected it, had taken it for granted. She might, or might not, have known that there was a little wax baby-doll, in long clothes, hidden in Lily's bedroom.
But certainly neither she, nor anybody else, knew that the doll Sophy had accompanied Lily to school.
Worse—Lily played with Sophy in secret and took her into bed with her every night. She had a small bedroom to herself, as had most of the elder girls, and as soon as the governess in charge had paid her brief nightly visit of inspection, and extinguished the light, Lily crept out of bed, felt her way to the chest of drawers, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out the baby-doll from underneath a pile of garments folded at the very back of the drawer.
She pretended that Sophy had to be hidden away in a cave all day from danger of kidnapping, and that she might only visit her at night. She cuddled her, and talked to her in a whisper, and went to sleep with her in her arms.
With part of herself, Lily really believed that Sophy could understand what she said to her, and appreciate the caresses lavished upon her. There was never any question of her forgetting to conceal the little doll again in the mornings. She was far too genuinely terrified of being found out.
It appalled her, occasionally, to think of the effect that discovery might have upon all those Real Live People. Not only the girls, but everyone she had ever known—governesses and servants, and relations like Aunt Clo and Cousin Charlie, or her father. Lily did not really feel that even her mother would have understood, although, like most motherless children, she idealized the memory of the dead woman. The only person with whom she knew that her secret could quite well have been shared, would have been Vonnie.
They had always played "pretence games" together, and Vonnie would have outgrown them no more than Lily.
It was partly this consciousness of a guilty secret, of which Lily was unutterably ashamed, that kept her from any intimate friendships at school.
Like many naturally reserved people, she held an ideal of friendship that included the most complete unreserve, and how could such a thing ever be possible to a person who would have to begin by saying:
"I am not like other people. I am not a nearly grown-up girl like you are—I still play pretence games with myself, although I am sixteen. All the pencils in my pencil-box have names, and ages and characters. I like quite baby toys, and I would much rather play by myself with a box of tin soldiers, than go for a school-picnic, or to see a Shakespearean play. I have got a baby-doll and I talk to her and take her to bed every night, and I always mean to go on, as long as I live."
Whenever Lily reached this climax, in her imaginary confession, she always saw the recipient of it, not necessarily as derisive or scornful, but simply, blankly amazed and completely uncomprehending.
There could be nobody who would understand in the whole world.
The whole world, if bounded by the gates of Bridgecrap, certainly justified Lily's instinct in that respect.
She liked most of the girls, although she knew in her heart that there was no real link between herself and any one of them. This she put down to that indefinable eccentricity of hers which differentiated her from the rest of the world. She knew that the girls were conscious of it too, although it would not have occurred to them to put it into words.
The discussion of an abstract question amongst themselves they would have considered to be an affectation, and bad form, although the youthful Briton's trick of freely making crude personal remarks flourished unchallenged.
"I say, what a scarlet nose you've got!"
This was entirely permissible and called for neither comment nor reply, other than a casual "Have I—what's it matter?"
But Lily always remembered the outcry that followed upon a remark once made by one of the younger pupils:
"I wonder why one gets that funny feeling sometimes of having done things before? Sort of like that Indian thing Mam'oiselle was reading about the other day—reincarnation or something——"
"Here! Chuck it, please. That was in a lesson!"
"Little girls shouldn't use long words they don't understand," said a senior severely.
"Snub for you, Elizabeth Fulham, showing off like that! Trying to be original, I s'pose! Did you ever hear of such affectation in a Fourth Form kid!"
Apparently no one ever had and no one ever did again, Elizabeth Fulham subsiding, with a very red face, into silence and subsequent orthodoxy. Certainly no one else at Bridgecrap could fairly be accused of trying to be original. It would have been the unforgivable sin.
Everyone seemed to copy everyone else.
Many of the girls copied Dorothy Hardinge, the eldest of Charlie Hardinge's three kiddies, because she was very good at games and had won the High Jumping Competition two years running at the school sports. The Third Form girls parted their hair in the boyish way affected by Dorothy, and used the same slang that she did; and were "keen" on the mathematical mistress, because Dorothy was "keen" on her.
Schoolgirl friendships were not the fashion at Bridgecrap, and were cried down as "sloppy" by the girls themselves.
But it was de rigeur to have an infatuation for one or other of the teachers, with the exception of Mademoiselle who, being a "beastly foreigner," naturally "didn't count."
The majority of these enthusiasms might almost be described as being artificially manufactured to meet the requirements of that great law that enforced conformation to type. The mildest demonstrations only were indulged in.
"Isn't she swe-eet—isn't she ducky?"
Such was the prescribed formula when Lily was at Bridgecrap, and once it had been ecstatically uttered, the speaker was recognized as being "keen" on Miss So-and-So, and there the matter remained stationary.
There were one or two exceptions to this comparatively healthy state of affairs, as is inevitable in any community living under similar conditions of unnatural segregation. Lily, without knowing why, hated the headlong adorations that occasionally overtook a girl for one of the mistresses, and that almost always resulted in some unspecified crisis, when the adorer was sent for by Miss Melody, and severely, though quite inexplicitly, cautioned against "foolishness."
Sometimes, Lily thought, the mistress was cautioned too, for very often her manner to her devotee would change abruptly, and become very cold and self-conscious.
The affair almost always ended in a violent reaction, when the discarded adorer would hate vehemently where she had erstwhile loved. Such affairs always made Lily feel glad that she herself was not particularly attracted to anyone at Bridgecrap. The whole thing seemed to her to be so oddly undignified, and besides, it was always the least likeable girls who were overtaken by such infatuations.
Lily knew, unaccountably, that there was a subtly unwholesome element in the school, sometimes a very minor element indeed—but always there.
She guessed, vaguely, at the subjects of certain whispered conversations and giggling references, but although she was quite aware of unenlightened curiosities and perplexities of her own, the thought of sharing them would literally have revolted her. Nor did the whisperers and gigglers ever approach her, instinctively able to discern, as they were, exactly whom they might or might not hope to admit to their foolish, underbred companionship.
The youngest of Charlie Hardinge's daughters was the child in the school whom Lily liked best, although she knew that she had been expected to make friends with her contemporaries, Dorothy and Janet. But Dorothy who, as her father had said, stood five-feet five in her stockings at thirteen years old, and had a back like a ramrod—Dorothy, at fifteen, had attained to a degree of athletic prowess that admitted her to the comradeship of the most highly placed girls in the school.
She naturally took not the slightest notice of Lily, who was universally recognized at "a perfect duffer at games."
Of Janet Hardinge, Lily was frightened, although Janet was her junior. Janet was clever, according to the Bridgecrap standards, and she was amongst the few girls in the school who expressed a contempt that was not, in the main, wholly good-natured, for Lily's physical inefficiency. She had a spiteful tongue, that turned itself readily to personalities of a coarse and wounding nature, and Lily's sensitiveness was sufficiently obvious to render her a favourite target. Janet was not popular, and Lily was perhaps the only one of her school-fellows who realized that hers was simply the obtuse cruelty of the absolutely unimaginative. Her sister Sylvia was four years younger than Lily, and so entirely absorbed by hockey that only the chance of school theatricals revealed to either that they had anything in common.
A play was acted every year at Midsummer. At first, Lily had been convinced that she could act. She knew that the girls to whom the important parts were given frequently spoke their lines with perfectly meaningless intonation, and with emphasis very often laid in the wrong place.
She felt certain of distinguishing herself, although the first part given to her was a tiny one, and she noted with relief that her voice, when she spoke her brief sentences, sounded very clear and distinct, amongst those other voices that were almost all charged with self-consciousness.
Her satisfaction reached a brief climax and then was dashed to earth.
"Very good, Lily Stellenthorpe!" said an unnecessarily surprised junior mistress. "I wish you principals would put as much intelligence into some of your speeches. You, for instance, Dorothy Hardinge."
Dorothy Hardinge giggled. She was too good-natured to take offence, and it was clear that the whole question of the play seemed to her to be a very unimportant one.
Perhaps something of this attitude of mind was rather too obvious in her demeanour.
"Lily!" commanded the mistress sharply. "You can read that long speech of Dorothy's, and see what you make of it."
Ever since her arrival at Bridgecrap Lily had been convicted of her inferiority to everyone there.
Now, in a glorious flash, she saw her chance of at last achieving a success.
She read the speech without hesitation, and felt that she had read it very well.
"Excellent! I wish I'd given you a bigger part. We'll see...."
Lily was disproportionately excited.
The next day, she was told to give Dorothy's speech again, this time with the necessary action, which included a slow entrance and a dramatic exit prefacing the fall of the curtain.
"Oh, my dear child! Hold yourself properly—you can't walk like that. And your hands—no, no—that won't do. Can't you move properly?"
It was just what Lily could not do. Her instinct for the correct manipulation of words and ideas did not extend to the disposition of her own muscles.
Enforced drill, gymnastics and detested games, begun too late and without any attempt at individual tuition, had failed to impart to Lily the natural poise and erect bearing that made Dorothy Hardinge's movements harmonious. Her body was as self-conscious as her mind was supple and alert.
"No use at all. We can't have her standing about the stage like that. What would Miss Melody say?"
"I'm sorry, Lily," said the junior mistress kindly. "It's a great pity you can't learn to hold yourself properly. Otherwise, you might act very well."
Lily's brief triumph was over, at the expense of this humiliation.
It was then that Sylvia Hardinge surprised her by saying quietly: "It's a shame! You said all that stuff perfectly splendidly—as though it really meant something. They ought to let you have a really good part—you act better than any of us."
Lily secretly agreed with her, whilst believing herself conceited for doing so, but she was none the less astonished and gratified at Sylvia's appreciation.
"I'm glad you think I can act. Did I really hold myself so very badly?"
"Yes," said Sylvia simply. "Frightfully."
It was like a douche of cold water.
Lily's friendship with Sylvia was destined to run a course that was neatly foreshadowed thus in their first encounter.
Sylvia admired Lily, thought her clever and very pretty, and was a sympathetic and affectionate companion.
Lily felt passionately grateful for her affection, and sometimes told herself joyfully that she had found a friend at last.
And then from time to time she was suddenly brought up short against the sharply defined limits of Sylvia's comprehension, and the jarring candour of Sylvia's ruthlessly unalterable condemnations.
Grown-up people always told one that in this world there was no such thing as a perfect friendship. Lily obediently generalized thus, and strove for philosophy in defiance of a hidden, quite unsupported certainty, in the depths of her own mind, that the generalization was a false one.
It was not until her final half year at Bridgecrap that Lily came under the direct personal influence of the headmistress.
Miss Melody was fifty-seven, she had given up her life to the work of education, and she still brought to it the enthusiasm of a pioneer. Her solitary weakness was the not altogether uncommon one of an unshakable belief in her own infallibility.
"You may have a difficult time in front of you, childie," she said to Lily very kindly. "A motherless girl is very often at a great disadvantage. I was motherless myself before I was twenty."
She had a rounded mellow voice and always articulated her words with great deliberation and distinctness. "And the dear little brother! Is that a big responsibility, Lily?"
"Kenneth will be going to school almost at once," said Lily evasively.
She would like to have replied, as Miss Melody obviously expected her to do, with an admission of her own perplexities as regarded her relations to Kenneth, but she knew very well that no responsibility would really be hers. Nothing vital bound her to Kenneth as she had been bound to Vonnie, and the immense gulf of her ten years' seniority had inspired in her no maternal solicitude towards her independent little brother.
"He will be nearly eight when I leave here, and I know my father means him to go to school when he's eight," said Lily.
"Child, you're not going to be a shirker, are you? Lily, Lily, isn't that the weak place? Ah, I thought so. I thought so. Afraid of responsibility, aren't you?"
Miss Melody's eye was at once penetrating and melancholy, as she fixed it upon her pupil.
"Now, childie dear, if you know what that weakness of yours is, fight against it. Fight against it, dearie, and pray. Don't forget what prayer can do for us all. The very weakest can be made strong, you know...."
Lily listened with a sense of disquiet. She felt vaguely that Miss Melody, so kind and wise and helpful, had somehow evolved a preconceived idea that did not altogether fit the reality.
"I don't know whether it is exactly that I'm afraid of responsibility," Lily began, feeling that the help Miss Melody was so willing to impart must rest upon a basis of fact, if it was to be of value to her.
The schoolmistress laughed softly.