Then she dropped her deep, soft voice impressively.
"I've studied you, childie dear, and thought about you very often. There's weakness, Lily—there's weakness. You'll have to be very much on your guard. I should like to have seen you much keener about games, much more in earnest for the honour of the school at our hockey and cricket matches. You may think that those things are of no very great importance in themselves, but there's a fine spirit behind it all, you know—a thoroughly English spirit. It's that keenness that you seem to me to lack."
Miss Melody paused, and looked with her characteristic air of profound scrutiny at Lily.
"Well?" she said encouragingly.
Lily felt that she was letting slip an opportunity for just such a clarification of issues as she had long sought after, but the habits of obscure and muddled thinking into which she had all her life been led stood in her way.
She made a consciously inadequate effort, belatedly.
"I think I could be more—keen—about things, if I only felt they were more worth it," she said confusedly. "I know I'm no good at games, but it isn't only that—it doesn't seem to me to matter frightfully whether one's good at them or not—and it's the same about other things, even lessons. I do enjoy them—some of them at least—but all the time I've got a sort of feeling—what's it all for?"
She paused, confused and frightened.
"Go on——" said Miss Melody. Her voice was slightly melancholy, but she was slowly nodding her head, as though in comprehension.
"I think if I could find something that seemed to me thoroughly worth while I could—could really let myself go and give my whole self to it. Something like a—a person one loved very much, or a sort of life one felt was right for oneself—not just right in itself——" Lily stopped, in utter disarray.