“Some may have escaped. Descendants may be nearer than you suppose. Why you and me, Christina, we may have Atlantic blood!”
His manner conveyed his conviction.
“It doesn’t seem to help much,” she said.
“Helps more than you think. Hidden gifts. Insight. Things like that. We aren’t common persons, Christina Alberta.”
For some moments the two of them pursued independent reveries.
“Still we don’t know we’re Atlantics,” said Christina Alberta.
§ 2
After she had fought her way to the sixth form in the Taverners’ School the educational outlook of Christina Alberta was troubled by dissensions both within the school and without. The staff was divided about her, her discipline was bad, her class-work rank or vile, but she passed examinations, and particularly external examinations by independent examiners, with conspicuous success. There was a general desire to get her out of the school; but whether that was to be done by a university scholarship or a simple request to her parents to take her away, was a question under dispute. The games-mistress was inclined to regard murder as a third possible course because of the girl’s utter disregard for style in games, her unsportsmanlike trick of winning them in irregular and unexpected ways, and her tendency to make drill and gymnastics an occasion for a low facetiousness far more suitable for the ordinary class-room. The English and Literature mistress concurred—although Christina Alberta would spend hours over her essays working in sentences and paragraphs from Pater and Ruskin and Hazlitt so that they might pass as her own original constructions. It was not Christina Alberta’s fault if ever and again these threads of literary gold were marked in red ink, “Clumsy” or “Might be better expressed” or “Too flowery.” Only the head-mistress had a really good word for Christina Alberta. But then the head-mistress, as became her position, made a specialty of understanding difficult cases.
And Christina Alberta was always quietly respectful to the head-mistress, and could produce a better side to her nature with the most disconcerting alacrity whenever the head-mistress was called in.
Christina Alberta, as soon as the issue became clear to her, decided for the scholarship. She reformed almost obtrusively, she became tidy, she ceased to be humorous, she lost sets of tennis to the games-mistress like a little sports-woman, and she stopped arguing and became the sedulous ape of Stevenson for the estranged English mistress. But it was up-hill work even in the school. There was a little too much elegant surrender in her reformed tennis and a little too much parody about her English in velveteen. The possibility that she would ever join that happy class of girls who go in from the suburbs to classes in London and lead the higher life beyond parental inspection and sometimes until quite late in the evening in studios, laboratories and college lecture-rooms, seemed a very insecure one, even without reckoning with the quiet but determined opposition of her mother.