Then in November, Julia Reynolds, who had been absent, I know not why, returned to school; and I realized the difference between cherishing a tender passion and being consumed by one, between fanning a flame and being burned. To make all this clear to Elizabeth, who was passion proof, lay far beyond my power. When she said,—
“Holy Saint Francis! what a change is here,”
—or words to that effect,—I had not even Romeo’s feeble excuses to offer, though I was as obstinate as Romeo in clinging to my new love. Tony supported me, having a roving fancy of her own, and being constant to Ella Holrook, only because that imperious graduate regarded her as an intolerable nuisance.
Julia’s views on the subject of satellites were even more pronounced. She enjoyed a painful popularity in the Second Cours, and there were always half a dozen children abjectly and irritatingly in love with her. She was held to be the cleverest girl in the school, a reputation skilfully maintained by an unbroken superciliousness of demeanour. Her handsome mouth was set in scornful lines; her words, except to chosen friends, were few and cold. She carried on an internecine warfare with Madame Bouron, fighting that redoubtable nun with her own weapons,—icy composure, a mock humility, and polite phrases that carried a hidden sting. It was for this, for her arrogance,—she was as contemptuous as a cat,—and for a certain elusiveness, suggestive even to my untrained mind of new and strange developments, that I surrendered to her for a season all of my heart,—all of it, at least, that was not the permanent possession of Madame Rayburn and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was not playing the game. She was nobody’s satellite just then, being occupied with a new cult for a new nun, whom it pleased her to have us all adore. The new nun, Madame Dane, was a formidable person, whom, left to myself, I should have timorously avoided; but for whom, following Elizabeth’s example, I acquired in time a very creditable enthusiasm. She was tall and high-shouldered, and she had what Colly Cibber felicitously describes as a “poking head.” We, who had yet to hear of Colly Cibber, admired this peculiar carriage,—Elizabeth said it was aristocratic,—and we imitated it as far as we dared, which was not very far, our shoulders being as rigorously supervised as our souls. Any indication of a stoop on my part was checked by an hour’s painful promenade up and down the corridor, with a walking-stick held between my elbows and my back, and a heavy book balanced on my head. The treatment was efficacious. Rather than be so wearisomely ridiculous, I held myself straight as a dart.
Madame Dane, for all her lack of deportment, was the stiffest and sternest of martinets. She had a passion for order, for precision, for symmetry. It was, I am sure, a lasting grievance to her that we were of different heights, and that we could never acquire the sameness and immobility of chessmen. She did her best by arranging and rearranging us in the line of procession when we marched down to the chapel, unable to decide whether Elizabeth was a hair’s breadth taller than Tony, whether Mary Aylmer and Eloise Didier matched exactly, whether Viola had better walk before Maggie McCullah, or behind her. She never permitted us to open our desks during study hours, or when we were writing our exercises. This was a general rule, but Madame Dane alone enforced it absolutely. If I forgot to take my grammar or my natural philosophy out of my desk when I sat down to work (and I was an addlepated child who forgot everything), I had to go to class with my grammar or my natural philosophy unstudied, and bear the consequences. To have borrowed my neighbour’s book would have been as great a breach of discipline as to have hunted for my own. At night and morning prayers we were obliged to lay our folded hands in exactly the same position on the second rung of our chair backs. If we lifted them unconsciously to the top rung, Madame Dane swooped down upon us like a falcon upon errant doves,—which was dreadfully distracting to our devotions.
“I don’t see how she stands our hair being of different lengths,” said Tony. “It must worry her dreadfully. I caught her the other night eyeing Eloise Didier’s long plats and my little pigtails in a most uneasy manner. Some day she’ll insist on our all having it cut short, like Elizabeth and Agnes.”
“That would be sensible,” said Elizabeth stoutly, while Lilly put up her hands with a quick, instinctive gesture, as if to save her curly locks from destruction.
“You needn’t talk,” went on Tony with impolite emphasis, “after what you made her go through last Sunday. You and Agnes in your old black veils. I don’t believe she was able to read her Mass prayers for looking at you.”
Elizabeth grinned. She was not without a humorous enjoyment of the situation. Our black veils, which throughout the week were considered decorous and devotional, indicated on Sundays—when white veils were in order—a depth of unpardoned and unpardonable depravity. When Elizabeth and I were condemned to wear ours to Sunday Mass and Vespers,—two little black sheep in that vast snowy flock,—we were understood to be, for the time, moral lepers, to be cut off from spiritual communion with the elect. We were like those eminent sinners who, in the good old days when people had an eye to effect, did penance in sheets and with lighted tapers at cathedral doors,—thus adding immeasurably to the interest of church-going, and to the general picturesqueness of life. The ordeal was not for us the harrowing thing it seemed. Elizabeth’s practical mind had but a feeble grasp of symbols. Burne-Jones and Maeterlinck would have conveyed no message to her, and a black veil amid the Sunday whiteness failed to disturb her equanimity. As for me, I was content to wear what Elizabeth wore. Where MacGregor sat was always the head of the table. The one real sufferer was the innocent Madame Dane, whose Sabbath was embittered by the sight of two sable spots staining the argent field, and by the knowledge that the culprits were her own Second Cours children, for whom she held herself responsible.