The Girl: An Autobiography: Ii. Girlhood

I

I ASKED Miss Ellen one day why there were no lady soldiers. She laid her hand suddenly on my shoulder and I could feel it trembling through my serge dress. ‘There are, darling,’ she said, ‘hundreds of them. They carry no bright banners, and when they march there is no band. Often the uniforms they wear are quite shabby. When there is a victory, none know it but themselves — and the enemy.’ Then she smiled abruptly and dropped her hand. ‘But it’s a glorious fight just the same, and a great one.’

‘Do they get cold and hungry like real soldiers?’ I asked.

Miss Ellen stared out of the window and spoke very slowly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Often I wonder if that would help. Perhaps it is necessary that they should.’

Then I put my arms round her neck, and hid my eyes on her shoulder. I felt strange and afraid, as once a long time before, when Jack’s guinea-pig was sick and lay in my lap. Presently he died. I wanted to hold him but I could not.

Next morning, I told Eleanor what Miss Ellen had said. We should be soldiers too. Mother bought us little badges. They had a gold cross against a white enameled shield. On the arm were the letters S. of D. ‘Soldiers of Duty’ we called ourselves. We had little books in which we wrote each day. One was for the victories, another for defeats, and a third for pillages. When we did some one a kindness which cost us no sacrifice, we called it a pillage. Jim¹ was my captain. I dedicated my book of victories to him. Every night, when Fräulein had gone out, I sat on the floor by the nursery fire and wrote my accounts. Jim sat beside me in the big armchair. When I had finished I laid the three books in his lap. For victories and pillages he said nothing; but if there were defeats, he would run his fingers through my hair and hold my head back, looking into my eyes.

One time, father and mother were going to New Orleans. They said that they would take me.

‘But Fräulein will be so unhappy if you leave her,’ I told them.

Mother said that father was tired, and Fräulein’s crying would worry him. She was quite sensitive. Once mother had called me to dinner and forgotten to include her name. I could not persuade her to go down with me. When we were eating our salad, she came in without speaking. The tears rolled off her cheeks and some of them fell into her plate. When mother saw this, she threw her napkin on the table and went upstairs.

If I went to New Orleans, there would be another defeat in my book. It made me very unhappy when Jim held back my head and looked at me, and so I told mother that I would rather stay at home.

That night Jim laughed and kissed me.

‘You’re getting fat, Karpeles, living on the ranch,’ he said.

I liked that victory better than any other in my notebook.

One day during the summer vacation Eleanor sent me a newspaper clipping. Jack brought the envelope down to the brook where I was washing some doll clothes. The article said that Jim’s wife had divorced him after fifteen years of marriage because he was in love with an actress of his company. When I read it, I let the paper fall on the grass before me. The wind blew it into the current, where it was whirled in and out among the stones of the brook bed. I sat quite still, with my hands lying in my lap. On the opposite bank was a bush of yellow touchme-nots. Every few moments one of the little flowers would fall to the ground. At last I thought that if another blossom dropped, I should scream aloud.

Then I got up and walked to the house. I went aimlessly about my room, touching first one and then another of Jim’s pictures. Finally I put them all into a little silver box which stood on my bureau and burned them. I threw the casket and the ashes into the lake. When I came back, the candle which I had used was still sputtering. I picked up the steel nail-file which lay beside it and held it into the flame. When it was glowing, I pulled open the lacing of my sailor blouse and held it against my breast. It made the skin draw together suddenly, like the meshes of father’s sock which Fräulein was teaching me to darn. The burn seemed to pierce an opening into my heart by which the pain which strained it might escape.

After this, I no longer kept my victory and my pillage books. Every night I wrote down only the defeats. Then I would lie awake making up new ones for the following day. It grew to be a kind of game, trying to break the other records.

Mother had planned to let Fräulein go in the fall. But one day, when our neighbor called because I had squirted olive oil at her with my water pistol, she looked at me and shook her head.

‘ I guess you are not old enough to be without a governess,’ she remarked.

When Fräulein heard this, she laughed and then shook me.

‘Kleiner Spitzbube,’ she said, ‘your naughtiness is not quite bad after all.’

One day mother was going to a reception on a yacht which was anchored in the bay. Billy Fargo asked me to paddle out with him to a place where we could watch the people. They were stretched in steamer chairs on deck. The orchestra was playing, and waiters in white coats and aprons were serving refreshments.

‘ Ugh! ’ Billy grunted, ‘ how lazy they are! ’

‘Let’s pretend that I’m drowning,’ I said, ‘and see what they will do.’

So we paddled over to Jack, who was fixing his motor-boat beside the pier, and asked him to come out and tow us.

‘But, you goops,’ he protested, ‘I’d upset you.’

‘We want to be upset,’ I told him.

Billy took off his heavy shoes and threw them into the launch. Then we started. I sat in the bow and held the painter from Jack’s boat. He went straight out into the bay, to turn suddenly at right angles. The rope slackened for an instant, and then straightened with a jerk. It lifted me over the gunwale into the water. I almost forgot to scream before I sank. When I came up, Billy had jumped in too, upsetting the canoe. We both looked over at the yacht. The people had scrambled to the railing, and the sailors were unfastening the tackle on the lifeboats. Then I grabbed Billy around the neck, and began to scream. His face grew quite red, and he pinched my arm violently until I let go. He swam to the canoe and began emptying it, pushing it from him until the water within splashed over the edge, then jerking it up before more entered. Old Macksaba, the Indian rug-weaver, had taught him early in the summer.

When the boat was almost empty, Billy threw in the seats and paddles which I had collected, and scrambled in himself. When I asked afterwards how he did it, he only grunted, and did not answer. He balanced the canoe while I climbed over. The lifeboat from the yacht had just struck the water. Then we paddled ashore and ran up through the woods. I hid my clothes in the attic.

When mother came home, she said a girl had almost been drowned in the bay.

Since I no longer lived with Jim, I began pretending book-people again. One evening I was the Lady of Shalott. There was a full moon, which shone brightly on the little river that emptied into the bay. I lay in the bottom of our white canoe, with my head and arms hanging over the edge. My hair was loose and trailed in the water. The boat drifted slowly with the current, and it was very still. Presently, from round the bend, I heard the swish of oars. It drew nearer and nearer, until I could distinguish the squeaking of the locks in their sockets. My canoe was broadside across the river. Suddenly the bow of the other boat struck it, barely missing my head. The occupant dropped his oars, and wheeled about, swearing. Still I did not open my eyes. There was a long silence, and then he bent over and slowly lifted my arm. It was cold and wet, and I made it as heavy as possible. The man gave a queer noise in his throat and let my arm drop back into the water. Then he grasped the gunwale of the canoe and shook it violently.

‘Lady! lady! wake up!’ he said. ‘In God’s name, lady, wake up!’

After this he sat silently again for a moment; then he groped in the water for the painter of my boat and tied it to his own.

I sat up slowly and brushed back my hair. Then I reached over, and, unfastening my rope, threw it into the row-boat.

The man sprang up suddenly and shook his fist at me. ‘Little devil, I’d like to break your teeth in!’ he said.

One afternoon I dressed up like a gypsy. The hair-dresser in the village gave me two long switches for black braids. I covered my head with a red handkerchief; then I smeared my face and neck with pot-grease, and rubbed my hands in the mud. I put grease and mud on my flannel waist, and tore jagged rents in my skirt with a penknife.

The main street passed Jack’s house and the hotel, so that I ran through the woods to the railroad. I slouched along the ties with my shoulders bowed and my head hanging. Presently, I heard quick, heavy footsteps behind me. Somebody grasped my arm, and jerked me around roughly.

‘I’m the sheriff,’ the man said. ‘If you ’re not out of this town in one hour, I ’ll lock you and any of the rest of your damn gang in the coop.’

Then he dropped my arm, and went back the way he came.

I turned down a road which crossed the tracks, and stopped before the first gate. A girl was hoeing potatoes in the yard.

‘I tella you nice-a fortune,’ I said, and stretched my arm across the fence.

She laughed, and squirmed her bare toes in and out of the grit. Then she took a dime from her petticoat pocket and crossed my palm.

I laid the dime on the fence-post. ‘You getta married,’ I told her, ‘to a nice-a man in t’ree year.’

‘Ach,’ she said crossly, ‘you’re no good. I’m married already.’

‘The hand say t’ree year,’ I repeated doggedly.

‘Will I marry again?’ she asked me.

‘ Maybe.’

She dropped her rake, and held my wrist tightly, pushing her face close to mine. ‘Will Georgie —’ then she stopped and swallowed, and began again. ‘Will my Georgie die?’ she whispered.

We stood there silently together for a moment. When I looked up, I saw a tear had worn a pink channel on her grimy cheek.

‘I am not a real gypsy,’ I said slowly, ‘and nothing I told you is true.’

Then I drew away my arm, and turned to shuffle down the road, without looking back.

A few houses beyond lived a farmer whom we knew. When grandmother Barnes and I rode by in the motor he always waved his handkerchief, and came running toward us with branches of cherries, or an armful of apples. I stopped beside the nearest tree and picked up a plum. The farmer was pitching hay in the centre of the orchard. He grasped the end of his long fork and shook it at me violently.

‘You dirty beggar,’ he roared, ‘get out of my yard! Here I sweat in the sun all day, while you take your damn ease, and then you think I ’ll feed you ! ’

I dropped the plum, and walked on down the road.

Ten minutes later I heard some one plodding heavily behind me. It was the farmer’s wife. She held a huge slab of bread and meat, which she thrust into my hand. Then she turned round quickly, mopping her head with her apron, and went back without a word.

I went on slowly, eating my bread. It was dry, and the meat was very tough and salty. When I had finished, I sat down under a tree by the road. Near by was a house, where a man in shirt-sleeves was swinging in a hammock. Presently he got up, stretched his arms above his head, and came along the path toward my tree. He was smiling, and his face was red and shiny. He had narrow eyes and a little thinlipped mouth.

‘Come in and stay a while, kid,’ he said, and sat down beside me in the grass.

I drew myself away and tried to slide into the ditch by the road, but he held the end of my skirt.

‘I must go home now, to supper,’ I explained.

‘They’ll get supper without you,’ he said, blinking, and twisting a ragged strand of my skirt.

I pulled at the cloth insistently. ‘Please.’

He rolled over on the ground, and leaned back, still smiling, to lay a hot palm on my hand.

‘Aw, don’t go,’ he said; and his voice was deep, and trembled.

I jerked my skirt loose, and, turning, ran toward the cottage, while the road reeled unevenly beneath my eyes.

Mother and father, the Fargos, and Jack’s family stayed very late at the seashore that summer. The leaves turned red, and the hotel windows were boarded up. The north wind whistled about our new cottage by the beach. One afternoon Billy and I wandered over to sit on the deserted hotel veranda. We found an old newspaper in one corner. There was a story in it about a thief. When the judge asked why he stole, he told him that he had slept that night in a dry-goods box in the alley, and had not had anything to eat for twenty-four hours.

‘Pooh,’ said Billy, ’I bet I would n’t steal if I were like that.’

We decided that next day we would go without any meals.

The following morning I had breakfast with father. He brought his book to the table, and did not notice that I was not eating. At noon Billy and I went on a picnic. The cook fixed up a big basket of sandwiches and cake. We gave it to a farmer who let us ride on his mowing machine. When I came home, I told mother that I had eaten so much lunch I did not care for any supper.

That night my head ached, and I could not sleep. I lay on my back and thought about the thief in the newspaper. Then I remembered that he had slept in a dry-goods box all night. Billy and I were not pretending it real.

When Fräulein had gone to bed, I put a sweater over my nightgown, and crawled out on the porch roof. Jack had taught me how to climb down by the lattice-work of the woodshed. When I reached the ground, I ran and took the boat-house key, which hung on a nail near the back door. Then I went down the path to the wooded point. It was very dark, and twice I went astray, and fell into the bushes. The night was cold, and the woods seemed very lonely. Nobody lived on the point.

The only fastening on the boat-house was the padlock outside. I put a barrel against the door, and tied an oar-lock to the end of a string which I wound about a hook on the panel. I balanced the oar-lock on a shelf near by, so that if any one opened the door, it would fall down. Then I climbed into the chest where father kept his sails, and wrapped myself in the canvas. I counted sheep jumping over a fence until I fell asleep. Pretty soon the padlock fell down and wakened me. I was very much frightened, and sat up in the chest. The moon shone brightly on the overturned barrel, and the wind danced the scattered shavings across the boathouse floor.

At dawn, I woke up again. It was very cold, and sharp little pains ran up and down from my knees and elbows.

I went home through the woods, and climbed to the porch roof again. When I was dressed, I went over and called Billy. Then we went to the village, and walked up and down in front of a grocery store. There were only some turnips in a barrel beside the door. Billy was right, for I could not steal them.

When we went home in October, mother sent me to a new school. I thought the pupils were very nice. The girl who sat next to me wore a large black hair-ribbon, with a gold pin in either loop. Her name was Elizabeth. We became great friends. Eleanor told me that she thought her father was an Indian. She said that her hair looked coarse, and she walked flat-footed. In the second week of school, Elizabeth asked me to join her club. It made me very glad and excited. When I told mother that evening, she forbade me to accept.

‘We do not know her family,’ she said.

The next morning, I explained to Elizabeth that mother thought I had better be at home out of school hours.

Then I sat staring at her curiously, for a long time.

’I hope you will know me when you see me again,’ she remarked at last, shrugging her shoulders.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, and my face became very hot.

Suddenly I leaned across the desk, and put my arms around her neck. I held her tightly, and kissed her on the forehead.

‘You do not know me well,’ I whispered. ‘Thank you for asking me to join your club.’

One day Eleanor’s father took us to the matinée. It was a play about fairies and a boy who would n’t grow up. During the intermission I read in my programme a short account of the leading actress’s life. It said that once she had played Romeo and Juliet with Jim.

When the curtain fell, I turned to Eleanor’s father. ‘I am going back of the scenes now, to see Miss Allen.’

Mr. Ethridge twisted the stubs of our tickets. His face was very red.

‘I think, my dear,’ he said, ‘that we had better wait until another time. I do not believe that your father and mother would like it.’

I did not answer, but hurried on down the aisle. There was a strange, trembling dryness in my throat.

‘Marian,’ Eleanor protested behind me, ‘how can you be so rude and thoughtless?’

Then we reached an open exit, and I ran out into the dank twilight of the alley.

There was a man standing by the stage door. He did not want to let me in. He leaned across the opening and chewed tobacco, arguing with me noisily. I took off my little gold bracelet and gave it to him and slipped in under his arm. Eleanor and her father followed slowly. She held his hand and walked on tiptoe.

Miss Allen was standing in the centre of the stage, talking to her maid.

Great sections of scenery swayed and toppled about her as the men shifted them back and forth. It looked like a huge card-house.

Mr. Ethridge wound and unwound a button on his coat. ‘Miss Allen,’ he said, ‘these little girls have begged to come and meet you.’

She looked down at us smiling, and shaking her head. ‘Adventurous babies,’ she said.

Her face was small, with eyes startlingly large and deep under their black lashes and blue shaded lids. They were thoughtful eyes, which watched each speaker with a fixed, almost anxious kindliness. The short light wig reminded me of Karpeles, so that when I saw it I looked away again quickly.

‘ I want to speak to you all alone for a minute,’ I said.

She took my hand, and we walked slowly across the stage.

‘We play that we are soldiers,’ I began, and stopped, the strange dryness trembling again in my throat.

‘Yes, dear, you pretend you are soldiers,’ she repeated softly, and tucked the white edge of my sleeve into my coat-cuff.

Then I went on in a monotone, and told her about Jim.

‘Was n’t it a little bit his wife’s fault?’ I asked.

‘I do not know him well, child,’ she said at last, ‘ but I think that he has always been a very nice person.’

I did not answer, but turned away, and went back to Eleanor and Mr. Ethridge.

‘Are you coming here again this year?’ Eleanor inquired eagerly.

‘I do not think so,’ Miss Allen replied. Then she came over to me, and standing behind me, rubbed the backs of her fingers up and down my cheeks.

‘I know that it is very hard, dear,’ she said, ‘ but you must not take it like this.’

But I slipped from her arms, and ran across the stage, and out into the alley.

Latin class was long, and very tiresome. I sat by the window, where I could look out at the people passing back and forth on the Drive. In the spring, the window was open. The ground was only eight feet below. One day I heard the fire-engines. Miss Wilcox was writing on the blackboard. I darted from my seat and vaulted over the sill. It was raining, and there was a large puddle of water beneath. A man with an umbrella was standing beside the puddle. I fell against his umbrella and bent it. When I struck the ground, I splashed dirty water on his shoes and trousers.

‘Please excuse me,’ I said, ‘but I am going to a fire.’ Then I ran on around the corner.

When the fire was out, I went back to the class-room. My clothes were plastered with mud, and my hair clung in strands to my damp forehead.

Miss Wilcox sent me to the office. The principal laughed when I came in. Then she told me to put on my coat and go home. I could not come back until she telephoned me. She said I was the most perverse girl in school. When I went home, I looked up perverse in the dictionary; it came from the Latin for ‘ turned the wrong way.’

That night mother and father talked for a long time in the library. Then they sent for me. They said that in the fall I was going to boarding-school.

Three weeks later, Fräulein went away. The afternoon that she left I was practicing in the parlor. She came downstairs, drawing on her gloves. Her hat was new, of yellow straw with pink roses, and her black hair was tightly crimped. When she saw me, she came over and stood staring into my face for a long time.

‘I hope that they will not send you home from boarding-school,’she said; ‘that would be too disgraceful.'

I rubbed the toe of my shoe back and forth across the carpet, and said nothing. Then suddenly she began to cry and to brush my hair clumsily with her big, rigid fingers. The cheek with the mole was turned toward me, and this time I did not avoid it.

I kissed her once, and then walked slowly beside her along the hall.

‘Good-bye,’I said stiffly, as I held open the door; and she went down the front steps, carrying her suitcase, and mopping her eyes with her white cotton gloves.

One day, before we went away to the seashore, Eleanor and I were walking down town together. On a corner, beside the steps of the elevated road, we met Jim. When I saw him, it seemed as if all my blood were drawn suddenly from my veins back into my heart. It was like the streams of sand-grains sucked after a wave through little channels cut in the beach. He limped slightly on one foot, and I wondered vaguely if he had hurt it while training a new pony for Karpeles.

‘Marian, you look so white,’Eleanor said, ‘and your lips twitch. You must be ill.'

Then I slipped my hand into hers, and we went on without speaking. Above, the elevated train rattled across the tracks, groaning shrilly as it swayed, and a newsboy on the corner behind us called the baseball score discordantly.

‘You are so stupid,’ I whispered to myself, ‘for there never was any Karpeles.'

II

On the warm hillside behind our house is a vegetable garden. Blackberry bushes grow beside the fence. In the spring, the gardener bends down the long, swaying branches, and buries their tips in the earth. The nodes along the stem put forth rootlets, and young tendrils spring up. So love bends the soul it touches, and begets new life.

The village about the school lay in a valley. Behind the houses of Main Street rose the first low ridge of hills. Across the green-brown checker-board of fields, the second ridge stood out against the sky in a hazy, straggling line. In the evening, the mist which hid all day among them crept out and stole across the fields. When it reached the little farmhouses, it seemed to rub its cheek gently along their splintery walls, as if it loved them, and then would fold them closely in its gray veils.

The school extended on either side of the village street. The square, colonial buildings, with the girls running in and out, reminded me of white beehives in an orchard.

Beyond was the church. Day and night, the bell in its slender steeple rang out the hours. It paused after each stroke, and seemed to gather up the myriad of tiny vibrations which filled the air, to boom them forth once more across the valley.

A river encircled the outskirts of the village. On its banks, at the foot of a side street, stood a nursery for blind babies. The first time that I went in, there was a little girl sitting in the centre of the playroom floor. She was tracing circles and squares in the air with her finger. The floor creaked under my foot, and she paused, with her arm still extended.

‘Who is there?’ she said.

‘I came from the school to see you,’ I told her.

Then she drew her breath sharply, and shook her hands up and down.

‘Nana,’ she screamed, ‘come quickly, one of the ladies is here!’

She clutched the edge of my skirt, and drew herself up slowly. Then she patted my belt and cheeks.

‘Lady,’ she said eagerly, ‘are you a child or a woman?’

My room in the school was on the second floor of the main house. The building was big and square — red brick with green blinds. It had been an inn many years before the Civil War. When you ran up the stairs quickly the narrow railings trembled, and, above, the little panes of the hall window made a sharp, clickety sound. The sick-room was at the end of the winding corridor. At the opposite end, near the front, stood Mrs. Hearn’s room.

Mrs. Hearn was the principal of the school. She was tall and large, with silver hair. Sometimes at night I would open my eyes and find her standing beside the bed. Once she shook me, holding on to my arm, so that I woke up suddenly.

‘Marian Crosby,’ she said, ‘what have you been doing?’

‘Nothing,’ I whispered.

She was very lovely with her soft hair hanging about her shoulders. She looked at me for a long time without speaking again, and then went away, closing the door quietly. The next morning she told me that a girl on the third floor had caught a mouse in an umbrella. She thought I had been out of my room, playing tricks on somebody.

My room-mate was an ‘old’ girl. Her name was Edith. She had pink cheeks, and blue eyes, and straight, dull hair. The line from her shoulder to her knee made a long beautiful curve. She used to hold her arms above her head, standing before the mirror and turning her body back and forth. In the morning she would pin her blouse with five safety-pins, in order not to hide the outline. She always went behind the screen so that I would not see how she did it. At night she was afraid of the dark, and made me hold her hand while she was going to sleep. If she woke up she bent over and scratched my forehead sharply until she wakened me.

’Please, Marian,’ she would whisper, ‘come down to the cooler with me. Our water is so warm.’

She was always afraid that I might walk in my sleep. It was very dangerous then, she said, if a person became conscious. She might harm the one who wakened her. Once, while I was taking a bath, she hid the purple stone. I searched until the bedtime bell, but could not find it. When she was almost asleep, I crawled slowly out onto the floor.

‘Can’t find it,’ I muttered, passing my hand across her dressing-table, so that the picture frames fell with a clatter.

Edith sat up suddenly.

‘ Marian,’ she whispered, very softly. Her voice whimpered like a child’s. ‘Mar—’ she began again, and smothered the word in her arm.

‘ Can’t find it,’ I repeated, scattering the little lead shot of the pen-holder across the floor. Then I pulled open her bureau drawers. The stockings and undervests were ranged side by side in neat black and white checks.

‘Can’t find it,’ I said, and threw them right and left over my shoulders.

Edith made a tense, gurgling sound in her throat. Then she grasped the railing of her bed, and screamed shrilly for Mrs. Hearn.

The mathematics teacher lived across the hall from us. At night, after the bell had rung, she would come down the corridor to each room, to see if the lights were out. I used to lie on my back in bed and listen for the rustle of her black silk petticoat. She would open the door swiftly and quietly, and pause for a moment on the threshold. From my pillow, I could see her profile against the dim light of the hall beyond. ‘The marble lady,’ Edith called her.

‘Good-night, girls,’ she would say briefly, and close the door.

Five minutes later, I could hear the swish of her skirts again, as she crossed the walk below the window, going to the house beyond. Sometimes I was awake when she came back, and I would jump out of bed to kneel on the window-box and watch her as she passed. She was tall and very straight, with a long, black cape which hung to her ankles. The rays of a street lamp shone brightly across the sidewalk, and for a moment I could see her face. It was thin, with square jaws and a chin like a man’s. Her forehead, framed by straight brown hair, was high and white. She had narrow lips, and a beautiful, regular nose. Her eyes stared before her as she walked. There were purple circles about them, as if the shadows had stolen from within and welled over their lids.

One night Edith did not go right to sleep. She came over into my bed and whispered long stories about girls and teachers of the school.

‘Edith,’ I said finally, ‘Miss Douglas, who wears the long black cape, has an engagement ring on her left hand. Do you think that her life has been very sad?’

‘Oh!’ she answered suddenly aloud, ‘she’s had a terrible life. My sister-inlaw went to college with her, and told me all about it. Her mother and father both died of tuberculosis, and when her brother developed it she broke off her engagement, because she said that it was not right for any one to pass consumption on.’

Presently Edith climbed back into her bed, and fell asleep.

As I lay awake beside her, I could only go over vaguely and quickly the story which she had told me. I could not pretend it to myself, as I usually did, because it hurt me so. Yet I was very happy. I had another captain, and would no longer write down my defeats.

There were ten long tables in the school dining-room. Each had twelve girls and two teachers. Edith and I sat three away from one another at the same table. The girl opposite me was called Sybil. She was heavy and white. Her hair was combed back and fastened in a tight knot on the top of her head. Usually her eyes were hidden by the shadows of their thick, drooping lids, but when she spoke she raised them slowly. The irises were clear and brown, like strong ale held toward the sunshine.

Once, at luncheon, Edith glanced over at Mrs. Hearn.

‘How much she coughs to-day!’ she exclaimed.

‘ But her cough is not as bad as Miss Douglas’s,’ I answered quickly.

Sybil looked up deliberately.

‘You would really be very sorry to have it so,’ she said.

Edith gave her head a quick little jerk.

‘Quite worthy of our oracle,’she remarked.

I was silent, staring at my spoon as it traced and retraced squares and triangles on the table cloth.

Finally I raised my head, and smiled into those queer amber eyes.

‘Thank you, Sybil,’ I said softly.

Just as we were going down to dinner one evening, the village bell rang loudly and persistently. From the hall window we could see people running up the hill. Some carried buckets and some were dragging mops. A little cottage on the outskirts of the school grounds was burning brightly.

Mrs. Hearn stood at the head of the stairs, her hands resting on either banister.

‘Nobody is to leave this house,’ she said.

I did not think of Miss Douglas. I only ran along the corridor and down the back stairs. The pantry window was open, and I scrambled through, hung by my hands from the sill, and dropped to the ground. I had on satin evening slippers. They soon became filled with snow, and so I took them off and carried them under my arm. When I reached the street I was very tired. The butcher boy was running beside me.

‘Oh, come on!’ he shouted when he saw me stop. ‘Be game!’ Then he took my hand and we went on up the hill together.

I stood inside of the school fence, hidden by the corner of a building. People were running from all directions with water. When they ran, the heavy buckets weighed them down on one side, so that they lurched back and forth. In the glare of the flames they made me think of Indians whom I had seen at the seashore, dancing about a camp-fire.

Mrs. Hearn and the school housekeeper had come up the hill. They stood right beside me, by the other wall of the jutting corner. I pressed my back against the house and kept very quiet. Beyond, the firemen were trying to turn on the water. They had the hose propped up on a saw-horse. A group of little boys stood in a semi-circle about the nozzle. Then a loop in the tubing behind untwisted suddenly. A jet of water shot out. It drenched the firemen and rolled two of the children over and over on the ground. I forgot that Mrs. Hearn was beside me, and began to laugh. She looked round the corner. The flames were very bright.

‘It is Marian Crosby,’ she said. Her voice trembled.

Then she took me by the shoulder and shook me.

‘ In the snow, with your thin slippers — oh, you impossible child!’

She made me lift up my foot, while she rubbed her hand over my ankle and instep.

‘ Go right home to bed! ’ she ordered.

I danced about on my other foot, trying to keep my balance.

‘But, Mrs. Hearn —’ I began excitedly.

She dropped my leg roughly.

‘Go home to bed!’ she repeated.

‘Yes, yes,’ I said; ‘but, Mrs. Hearn, did you see how the water knocked the little boys down?’

She looked at me for a moment. Then, against the firelight, I could see that her shoulders were shaking.

‘Terrible child!’ she said, and patted my hand. ‘ You have seen the fire. Now mind me and go home, before I am angry again.’

The next morning I went to the infirmary with bronchitis. One day, two of the nurses were talking outside of my door.

‘She has a strong tendency toward consumption anyhow,’ they said. ‘She had better be very careful.’

When I went back, Mrs. Hearn called me into her study. ‘You are too delicate for boarding-school,’ she told me, ‘ and too careless. Next year I cannot take the responsibility of letting you come back.’

I did not say anything for a moment, but stood beside her desk, twisting my coat sleeve.

‘ May I go into Miss Douglas’s ethics class for the rest of this term and next? ’ I asked her finally.

Mrs. Hearn considered a while.

‘Yes,’ she said. She had an odd way of closing her eyes and smiling, while she nodded her head up and down.

The following day I waited for Miss Douglas outside of the class-room door.

‘May I come in?’

‘Yes,’ she said, without turning her head, ‘ if you will pay attention. I hear that it usually is not your custom.’

The room in which the ethics class met was on the basement floor. It had little windows high above our desks. Outside, on a level with the sill, ran a narrow flagging which connected the house and the infirmary. When Miss Douglas lectured she leaned against the wall, with her cheek resting on a moulding of the ledge, and knotted the curtain string round and round her fingers. Often the hand which marked her place in the textbook before her would drop suddenly, so that the pages slipped together with a whispered, clicking sound. Then she would look aside out of the window, and tell us little stories of her own life. Some made us laugh, and some were very sad. Her voice seemed to come back from a long way off.

Sometimes the gardener rattled his barrow over the paving beyond. We would raise our eyes to see who was passing, and drop them quickly again to her face. Then she would pause abruptly, pick up her book, and turn to the page of our lesson.

One day she was quoting some lines from Tennyson.

‘ It was my duty to have loved the highest;
It surely was my profit had I known;
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.
We needs must love the highest when we see it,
Not Launcelot, nor another.’

She closed her eyes, and drummed her fingers restlessly upon the sill.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how lazy you all are! Quite smug about your tinsel, so that you need not dig to find the gold.’

Then she looked around the room slowly. Her lids drooped and her lips were slightly parted.

‘There is not one of you here,’ she told us, ‘who is capable of becoming great.’

Before I came to boarding-school I had promised a boy to kiss him after a year if he would not drink during that time. He had asked me in the summer, one day while we were out fishing. He made wonderful electric engines, no larger than a small cherry, with tiny, hair-like coils. These he kept in pill bottles, with the wires which connected them to the battery running out through the cork. I thought that some day he would be a great inventor.

After we had had the chapter on marriage and the family in our Ethics book, I decided to tell Miss Douglas of my promise. One night about ten minutes before the bed-time bell, I started to go across the hall to her room.

‘It is almost time to put the lights out,’ Edith remarked.

‘I am going to speak to Miss Douglas a minute,’ I told her.

‘What!’ she exclaimed, ‘You are going in to Miss Douglas with your wrapper on?’

And so I ran into the closet, and covered my hair with a hat, and my nightgown with a long evening cape.

The door was open and Miss Douglas was sitting by her desk, writing a letter.

‘I am afraid,’ I began, ‘ that you will think I am rather queer, asking you about this.’

She turned round and looked at me for the first time since I came in.

‘I think, Marian,’ she said, ‘that that is your chief aim in this school, to have people think you queer. Let me congratulate you on a laudable ambition.’

Then it was very still in the room. I held on to a corner of the table, with my face turned away.

‘ Well,’ I said at last, ‘ we won’t think of that now, for there is something which I had to ask you.’

Then I sat down, and told her about my promise.

The night before school closed, I turned off the lights after the bed-time bell, and then stood waiting, with my hand still on the switch, for Miss Douglas.

‘You are supposed to be in bed now,’ she said when she saw me, ‘not to be standing in the middle of the room in your nightgown.’

‘ Miss Douglas,’ I asked her, ‘ do you still think that my chief aim in this school is to have people consider me queer?’

She looked at me for a moment, and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said turning away, ‘not any more.’