The scheme was Eleanor's. She had an ideal, totally unbased upon experience, of a convent school, that was of an extreme and highly sentimental picturesqueness. In her mind's eye, mild-faced nuns paced perpetually up and down a garden, and innocent children, in a more or less permanent state of preparing for their première Communion, were instructed in the arts of music and embroidery and ancienne politesse française.
She combated Philip's strong objections to letting Lily go within the sphere of Catholic influence.
"It isn't as though she were older," Eleanor urged. "She's only a baby, Philip. And it will be for such a little while. Please God, we can have her home again by Christmas."
It was really the last argument that had most weight with Philip, and the desire that his wife's mind should be at ease about their darling.
Neither had the slightest conception of the utter unfitness for any form of independence in which they had brought up their child.
Philip himself took her to the convent, emphatically telling her in the presence of the Mother Superior that she must always say her prayers night and morning just as she had been taught them, and that she was not to think of herself as having been sent to school.
The reiteration of this last axiom rather disappointed Lily. It sounded much more grown up and like other girls to be sent to school, and school, according to many story-books, was an exciting place where one distinguished oneself easily and made interesting friendships and learnt to play games.
Lily was afraid that a convent might prove to be a very tame affair, by comparison. In effect, she never did learn to play games there, since the only one in vogue—a complicated system of running about wildly in the playground from one chalk-mark to another, called The Rescue of the Holy City from the Infidels—proved beyond her comprehension from the first to the last day of her stay.
Nor did she make interesting friendships, because any friendships at all were entirely forbidden and rendered impossible by a quantity of rules that were enforced by perpetual surveillance. Neither did she distinguish herself, excepting by the unprecedented number of humiliating and babyish mistakes that she seemed to be perpetually making.
Lily, for the first time in her life thrown amongst other children, heard from their unsparing lips various brutal truths about herself: She was a most frightful baby for her age.