No amount of sympathising or expostulating could draw another word out of her, so at last they went away. But all that night, till the silence bell rang, other girls came running in with the same cry.
Long after silence and darkness reigned Deborah sat on the side of the bed, and a fight which was bitter and hot was raging inside her.
“You are too conceited,” urged an even voice in her ear. “You imagine you write much better than you do. It is no good thinking you are unjustly treated; the prizes here are given as fairly as possible, and it is only the disappointed students who raise the hue-and-cry.”
“I know,” said Deborah, and sat silent.
“Besides, you have no gift that way,” the voice went on. “And it’s time you learnt it. You’ve had five more rejections within the last eighteen months—not to speak of those before entering college, and it ought to have taught you to understand your proper place better.”
“I know.”
“You have no talent except what is very mediocre. You are worthy only of a second prize, and not perhaps of that.”
The sense of injustice came burning hot and strong, and she clenched her two hands in profitless anger.
“Then why, if I have no talent, have they always said my essays are different from all the rest? Why have those governesses, who have nothing to do with the subject, congratulated me on them? Why have they always been read, and why—”
“Oh, now we are coming to quite a new phase,” replied the voice. “Formerly you looked down on college opinion, now you are laying store by it.”