"The old pain in the side has come back; the Swedish massage did it no permanent good. But I can still ride, so I don't squeal."
IX
SHARLAND COLLEGE
Fenella was nearly fourteen when she went to school. After Mrs. Barbour had seen her into the green horse-omnibus which at that date still rolled sedately westward along the Park paling the poor woman went home and, regarding with a stricken eye the untidy relics of a hurried breakfast, sat down and had a good cry. She would see her daughter again in a few hours, but her instinct told her that the parting was not one to be measured by time or distance.
At school Fenella achieved an instant success. At her lessons she remained a sad dunce, but Sharland College had the modern conception of bodily beauty as a supreme merit, and for its sake and also a little for the amiability that accompanied it, Nelly's shortcomings in algebra and geometry were forgiven and so mitigated by the assistance of plainer and cleverer girls anxious for her friendship as to be scarcely noticeable. She had become a fashion in the school before the end of her second term, and a host of extravagant, flattering nicknames attested this heady popularity. She was "Astarte" and "Principessa" in the higher forms; "Flash" in the gymnasium and swimming bath—a tribute to her bodily agility; "Zenobia" for one winter term, shortened into "Nobs" during a frenzied hockey rally and forthwith abandoned; "Greuzy" in artistic circles; while, oftenest of all and most eloquent of all—for it voiced the sense of a common possession—she was "Our Nelly." I do not know whether it is to her credit or discredit that the intimacy with Miss Rigby came to a sudden and unforced end in her first term. Poor Jasmine was forgotten or remembered only as a rather unhealthy dream. Fenella began even to refer to her flippantly as her "past"; "Ma, has my 'past' got up yet?" she would ask at midday on half-holidays when she came home to change for hockey or tennis and wanted to use the telephone.
It was upon wintry half-holidays that poor Mrs. Barbour felt her desolation most keenly. It did not seem to matter so much when she knew Nelly was working at school. There was a hungry and noisy return at half-past four to be looked forward to, and a whole golden evening during which she might knit and watch the dark head bent above the irksome home task. And in the summer she would not have had the child otherwise employed than in winning roses on lawn or river for the colorless cheeks that she was uneducated enough to think indicated a latent delicacy. But on rainy autumn afternoons, so brief and dark, with the fire burning cosily in the shabby parlor and only a prospect of forty feet of smoky grass, a leprous plaster cupid and the black wall of the mews to entertain herself with, it seemed unjust, even vaguely ominous to her peace, that her nestling preferred to beat her new-fledged wings out in the dark and cold. She never complained, but tried for a while to tempt her child to stay at home with her "favorite" books, her "favorite" armchair, a box of chocolates—poor ineffectual wiles that the short-sighted eyes of youth, set upon the quest of high-spiced pleasure abroad, passed over without seeing. There would be a hasty gobbled luncheon, taken standing, like the last meal in Egypt; a frenzied search behind old magazines that were never read and old music that was never played, for shoes and shin-guards—"Must have my new shin-guards to-day, mummy. Kilburn hack simply rotten—" a kiss, for the chocolates, given on the wing, and Fenella in red tam o' shanter and belted jacket of scarlet pilot cloth was off—through the area and up the steps.
"Expect me when you see me, mummy. I may chew with one of the girls."
She was not a religious woman, but she used to pray about this time, miserably and humbly, for her child's heart to be left to her. And, in the morning, between two mouthfuls of porridge, it was just possible that Fenella might look at her sharply, and say—
"What've you been doing to yourself, mummy? You look like a boiled owl this morning."
Who else was to notice that an old woman's eyes were red?