"She's burning the midnight oil. That's why her cheeks are so pale!"
"Look here, Phil, a poetess shouldn't eat so much bread-and-butter. You ought to live on odes and sonnets!"
Though I did not exactly burn the midnight oil, I certainly composed my poem in bed. I suppose the darkness and the quiet were inspiring, for all my best ideas came to me when the lights had been turned out, and only the sound of Lucy's regular breathing broke the silence.
I had tried at first to model my style on Spenser, with very indifferent success; I fared no better with the heroic couplets of Dryden or Pope; so, abandoning these ambitious efforts, I finally contented myself with a humble imitation of the cavalier poets, a period which we had just been studying in our literature class. I copied it out clearly, and with many qualms I dropped my contribution into Mrs. Marshall's letter-box. It was to be a point of honour not to let anyone read the poems beforehand, so even Cathy did not see my manuscript, nor did she show me hers, though I divined from her abstracted manner that she, too, had been engaged in all the agonies of composition.
The much-longed-for day arrived at last. At six o'clock we all assembled in the large school-room, Mrs. Marshall and the teachers taking their places on the platform. First came the examination lists. To my delight I was head of my class in French; Cathy carried all before her in both ancient and modern history; while Blanche and Janet divided the honours in geography and mathematics. It was now the turn of the poems, and I felt little cold shivers of nervousness running down my back as Mrs. Marshall rose to read out the result of the competition. Would she think mine very bad, I wondered, and perhaps even cite it as an example of faulty composition? For one wild moment I devoutly wished I had consigned it to the flames with the rest of my efforts.
"On the whole," began Mrs. Marshall, "I have had some extremely satisfactory results from our literary contest, a very fair number of poems having been received. I regret that some of the contributors do not seem to have mastered even the elementary rules of metre, and their verses cannot be made to scan, but the average standard is higher than I had expected; and I have two here which I think are certainly deserving of praise, and of such equal merit that I have decided to divide the prize between them. They are 'The Ballad of Fair Fiona', by Catherine Winstanley, and 'When Celia Passes', by Philippa Seaton. As I am sure you will all wish to hear them, I shall read them aloud:
"THE BALLAD OF FAIR FIONA
"When the daylight gilds the sky,
Fair Fiona sits and weeps;
When the evening star is high,
Lonely still her vigil keeps.
"'Rise, Fiona sweet, arise!
Don your robe of brightest hue.
Tears are but for aged eyes,
Love and pleasure wait for you!'
"'Love for me has long been dead,
Pleasure followed in his train;
Bring the willow wreath instead,
Leave me to my tears again.'