The Game of Love
It was an ancient and honourable convent custom for the little girls in the Second Cours to cultivate an ardent passion for certain carefully selected big girls in the First Cours, to hold a court of love, and vie with one another in extravagant demonstrations of affection. We were called “satellites,” and our homage was understood to be of that noble and exalted nature which is content with self-immolation. No response of any kind was ever vouchsafed us. No favours of any kind were ever granted us. The objects of our devotion—ripe scholars sixteen and seventeen years old—regarded us either with good-humoured indifference or unqualified contempt. Any other line of action on their part would have been unprecedented and disconcerting. We did not want petting. We were not the lap-dog variety of children. We wanted to play the game of love according to set rules,—rules which we found in force when we came to school, and which we had no mind to alter.
Yet one of these unwritten laws—which set a limit to inconstancy—I had already broken; and Elizabeth, who was an authority on the code, offered a grave remonstrance. “We really don’t change that quickly,” she said with concern.
I made no answer. I had “changed” very quickly, and, though incapable of self-analysis, I was not without a dim foreboding that I would change again.
“You were wild about Isabel Summers,” went on Elizabeth accusingly.
“No, I wasn’t,” I confessed.
“But you said you were.”
Again I was silent. The one thing a child cannot do is explain a complicated situation, even to another child. How could I hope to make Elizabeth understand that, eager to worship at some shrine, I had chosen Isabel Summers with a deliberation that boded ill for my fidelity. She was a thin, blue-eyed girl, with a delicate purity of outline, and heavy braids of beautiful fair hair. Her loveliness, her sensitive temperament, her early and tragic death (she was drowned the following summer), enshrined her sweetly in our memories. She became one of the traditions of the school, and we told her tale—as of another Virginia—to all new-comers. But in the early days when I laid my heart at her feet, I knew only that she had hair like pale sunshine, and that, for a First Cours girl, she was strangely tolerant of my attentions. If I ventured to offer her the dozen chestnuts that had rewarded an hour’s diligent search, she thanked me for them with a smile. If I darned her stockings with painstaking neatness,—a privilege solicited from Sister O’Neil, who had the care of our clothes,—she sometimes went so far as to commend my work. I felt that I was blessed beyond my comrades (Ella Holrook snubbed Tony, and Antoinette Mayo ignored Lilly’s existence), yet there were moments when I detected a certain insipidity in the situation. It lacked the incentive of impediment.