Anybody could see that she'd been made a regular spoilt child of at home.
It was most awfully affected, the way she was always using grown-up words.
It was simply silly, always to get red and cry at the least little bit of chaff.
It was perfectly indecent to wear such a disgustingly short frock—the nuns said so.
Lily was only too thankful to exchange her brief velveteen skirts for a blue serge uniform dress, that flapped against her ankles and of which the collar-band scratched her neck.
But even the uniform did not save her from committing other outrages upon propriety, hitherto unsuspected. A brand-new category of sins sprang into being, all of them classed under the heading of Immodesty—a word that Lily had never heard mentioned before.
Legs were particularly immodest. To show them, to cross one of them over the other, to mention them by name, was all highly immodest. So was any allusion to any part of the human anatomy below the shoulder-blades.
There was an uneasy suggestion that it might at any moment become immodest to talk about any male creature other than a priest, the convent gardener, or one's own father. Even brothers seemed to be better left out of the conversation.
The hideous immodesty latent in the taking of a bath could only be defeated by a cold, shroud-like garment of white calico, that fastened just above the wearer's collar-bone, was buttoned at the wrists, and fell in folds to the ground.
A bath, accompanied by a bath-chemise, was in readiness for each pupil once a week.