The invitation was given during the eleven o'clock break. Clare would occasionally join the school in Big Hall, and share its milk and biscuits. Often enough to make it any day's delightful possibility, not often enough for it to be other than an event. She would sit on the platform steps, watching the gay promenaders below, informal, approachable, tossing the ball to the daring few, hedged about, in turn, by the tentative many. Sometimes she would stroll about the hall with a girl on either side, or one only. She had a curious little trick of catching the girl she spoke with by the elbow, and pushing her gently along as she talked, bending over (she was very tall) and enveloping. Everybody knew the "Gendarme Stunt" as Cynthia Griffiths irreverently termed it, and no one would have dreamed of approaching or interrupting such a tête-à-tête.
Nevertheless, Miss Hartill had not exchanged three sentences with Louise Denny on the morning of Olivia Pring's arrival, before every girl in Big Hall knew of it, and twice the number of eyes were following them, with an elaborately accidental gaze, in their progress.
Possibly Clare was a little touched by Louise's delight at the invitation. At any rate she managed, in spite of her headache, to be a very charming companion. She confessed to the headache, and asked Louise for advice. And Louise, deeply concerned, could think of nothing but a recipe she had found in Clare's own Culpeper, in which rhubarb and powdered dormice figured largely. She suggested it in a doubtful little voice. The school would have given a good deal to know what made Miss Hartill laugh so.
Miss Hartill told Louise all about her visitor, whom, she declared, she depended on Louise to entertain, and added a couple of comical tales of their mutual schooldays. Unfortunately Clare's novelli owed their charm more to her inventive touches and graphic manner than to the actual underlying fact. Louise was left with the impression of an Olivia Pring who had been Friar Tuck to Clare's Robin Hood. She appreciated the honour of being asked to meet her to a degree that would have tickled Clare, had she guessed it.
"Miss Olivia Pring!" Louise meditated all day over Miss Olivia Pring. Evidently Miss Hartill's best friend.... She hoped Miss Olivia Pring would like her.... How dreadful it would be if she didn't ... for what might she not say of her to Miss Hartill? Louise must be careful, oh, so careful, of her manners and her speech.... It was rather hard luck that she would not have Miss Hartill to herself.... It would be dreadfully uncomfortable—talking before a stranger.... Except for the delightfulness of being asked by Miss Hartill, she could have wished that Miss Hartill had not asked her. Rather an ordeal for a thirteen-year-old—supper with Miss Hartill and Miss Olivia Pring.
Now shyness, like any other painful sensation, is inexplicable to such as have not experienced it, is at once forgotten by such as outgrow it, but to those at its mercy, to sheer suffering, paralysing, stultifying, a spiritual Torture of the Pear.
Clare Hartill should have understood; she had her own furtive childhood for reference; but Clare Hartill had a headache, and she was very tired of Olivia Pring. Olivia was so placid, so shapeless, so ridiculous, in her pink flannel blouse, and the reckless glasses, that were ever on the point of toppling over the precipice of her abbreviated nose into the abyss of her half-open mouth. It certainly did not occur to Clare that Louise could feel the slightest discomfort on account of Olivia Pring.
But Louise was blind to the flannel blouse, and the foolish face, and the unmanageable glasses. She was wearing glasses of her own, rose-coloured affairs, through which Miss Pring appeared, not only as a "grown-up" and a stranger, but as the intimate of Deity in Undress. Miss Pring did nothing to dispel the illusion—she had conscientiously flattened the high spirits out of too many little girls to be interested in a new specimen. She addressed herself chiefly to Clare—recalling incessantly, and enlarging upon, trifling incidents of their mutual past, which every fresh sentence of the badgered hostess contrived to recall to her elastic memory. Louise, always sensitive, her shyness growing with every word, could but take each unexplained allusion as a personal snub, and feeling herself entirely superfluous, began to imagine that Miss Hartill was already regretting the invitation. Panic-struck she tried to remedy matters by effacing herself as completely as possible. It was wonderful what a small and insignificant person Louise could sometimes look, and did look that evening in one of Clare's big arm-chairs. Her prim little whisper and deprecatory smile might have struck Clare as pathetic if Clare had not been so very tired of the affectionate reminiscences of Olivia Pring. As it was, she was annoyed. She had asked Louise of the bright eyes and quick stammer and extravagant imagery, to supper with her—the panther-cub, not the leveret. She had talked of Louise too—had looked forward to putting the child through its paces, if only for the benefit of Olivia Pring. She had even surmised that Louise would take Olivia's measure, and at a nod from Clare would be delicately, deliciously impertinent. Indeed, she had thought her capable of it. But it was only a schoolgirl after all—a silly tongue-tied schoolgirl—that she had for an instant compared with Alwynne: Alwynne, monstrously absent, a match for ten Olivias.
She yawned, shrugged her shoulders, and suggested, in fine ironic fit, a game of "Old Maid." Olivia was extremely pleased. She so much preferred Old Maid—or Beggar-my-Neighbour, perhaps?—to Bridge. She did not approve of Bridge. In her position it did not do. Clare would remember that she had always said....