"Every corridor of my father's school had finger-posts pointing to Siberia!" she declared dramatically.
When Marie was sixteen, she graduated from the "gymnasium" for girls, receiving a gold medal for excellence in mathematics and sciences. In Russia, as in Germany, the gymnasium corresponds to our high school, but also covers some of the work of the first two years of college. The name gymnasium signifies a place where the mind is exercised and made strong in preparation for the work of the universities.
The position as governess to the daughters of a Russian nobleman was offered to the brilliant girl with the sweet, serious eyes and gentle voice. As it meant independence and a chance to travel and learn the ways of the world, Marie agreed to undertake the work.
Now, for the first time in her life, the young Polish girl knew work that was not a labor of love. Her pupils cared nothing for the things that meant everything to her. How they loved luxury and show and gay chatter! How indifferent they were to truth that would make the world wiser and happier.
"How strangely you look, Mademoiselle Marie," said the little Countess Olga one day, in the midst of her French lesson. "Your eyes seem to see things far away."
Marie was truly looking past her pupils, past the rich apartment, beyond Russia, into the great world of opportunity for all earnest workers. She had overheard something about another plot among the students of Warsaw, and knew that some of her father's pupils had been put under arrest.
"Suppose they should try to make me testify against my friends," said the girl to herself. "I must leave Russia at once. My savings will surely take me to Paris, and there I may get a place as helper in one of the big laboratories, where I can learn as I work."
The eyes that had been dark with fear an instant before became bright with hope. Eagerly she planned a disguise and a way to slip off the very next night while the household was in the midst of the excitement of a masquerade ball.
Everything went well, and in due time she found her trembling self and her slender possessions safely stowed away on a train that was moving rapidly toward the frontier and freedom. No one gave a second thought to the little elderly woman with gray hair and spectacles who sat staring out of the window of her compartment at the fields and trees rushing by in the darkness and the starry heavens that the train seemed to carry with it. Her plain, black dress and veil seemed those of a self-respecting, upper-class servant, who was perhaps going to the bedside of a dying son.
"I feel almost as old as I look," Marie was saying to herself. "But how can a girl who is all alone in the world, with no one to know what happens to her, help feeling old? Down in my heart, though, I know that life is just beginning. There is something waiting for me beyond the blackness—something that needs just little me."