Chapter Two.
For Helen of Troy.
The excitement of the school knew no bounds. Hazlitt Chase was not a house divided against itself. All the girls loved all the other girls. Hitherto, there had never been a split in the camp. This was partly caused by the fact that there were no really very young girls in the school. A girl must have passed her fourteenth birthday before she was admitted. Thus it was easy to enlist the sympathies, to ensure the devotion of the young scholars. They worked for an aim; that aim was to please Mrs Hazlitt. She wanted to prepare them for the larger school of life. She took pains to assure them that the sole and real object of education was this. Mere accomplishments were nothing in her eyes, but she desired her girls to find a place among the good women of the future. They must not be slatternly; they must not be vain, worldly-minded, but they must be beautiful—that is, as beautiful as circumstances would permit. Each gift was to be polished like a weapon for use in the combat which lay before them; for the battle they had to fight was this: they had, in their day and generation, to resist the evil and choose the good.
Now, Mrs Hazlitt very wisely chose heroes and heroines from the past to set before her girls, and she felt very much annoyed now that Nora Beverley should object to take the part of Helen of Troy—Helen, who, belonging to her day and generation, had been much tried amongst beautiful women, badly treated, harshly used; sighed for, longed for, fought over, died for by thousands. That this Helen, so marvellous, so—in some senses of the word—divine, should be criticised by a mere schoolgirl and considered unworthy to be represented by her, even for a few minutes, was, to the headmistress, nothing short of ridiculous. Nevertheless, she was the last person to wound any one’s conscience.
She retired to her private sitting-room, and then quite resolved to give up “A Dream of Fair Women,” and to substitute some other tableaux for the pleasure of her guests.
Meanwhile, in the school, there was great excitement. Cleopatra, Jephtha’s daughter, the gracious Queen Eleanor, and the other characters represented by Tennyson in that dim wood before the dawn, were exceedingly distressed at not being allowed to take their parts.
“I have written home about it, already,” said Mary L’Estrange. “I have asked my father—who knows a great deal about antiquity, and the Greek story in particular—to send me sketches of the most suitable dress for Iphigenia. I have no scruples whatever in taking the part, and I cannot see why Nora should. Oh, Nora, there you are—won’t you change your mind?”
“My mind is my own, and I won’t alter it for any one living,” said Nora. “Now, don’t disturb me, please, Mary; I want to recite over the first six stanzas of ‘In Memoriam’ before I go to bed.”
She began whispering to herself, a volume of Tennyson lying concealed in her lap. Mary shrugged her shoulders and went to another part of the school-room. Here was to be found a girl of the name of Penelope. She was a comparatively new comer, and had not entered the school until just before her sixteenth birthday. Some pressure had been brought to bear to secure her admission, and the girls were none of them sure whether they liked her or not. Mrs Hazlitt, however, took a good deal of notice of her, was specially kind to her, and often invited her to have supper with herself in the old summer parlour, where Queen Elizabeth was said, at one time, to have feasted.
Penelope Carlton was not at all a pretty girl, but she was fair, with very light blue eyes, and an insipid face. Now, as Cara and Mary looked at her, it seemed to dart simultaneously into both their brains that, rather than lose the tableaux altogether, they might persuade Penelope to take the part of Helen. Penelope was not especially an easily persuaded young woman; she was somewhat dour of temper, and could be very disagreeable when she liked. Honora was a universal favourite, but no one specially cared for Penelope. Some of her greatest friends were the younger girls in the school, over whom she seemed to have an uncanny influence.