It was a good growing country. Chesson said that the mildness of the winters was due to the Gulf Stream; Miss Harriet Chesson attributed it to ozone—ozone having been a word to conjure with at the time when she had taken her Diploma. Ozone or Gulf Stream, it provided wild violets in December, lemon-verbena that grew in trees up the sides of the cottages and had to be cut away from the upper windows, and filled the deep lanes with the hart's-tongue fern. It also brought forth rich produce. The dairy business and poultry farm flourished; crates and parcels and returned empties kept the goods clerk at Rainham Magna station busy; and, when the heather bloomed on the hill that rose between Chesson's and the sea, the "Rainham Heather Honey," green as bronze and thick as glue, was at a premium. At the crest of the hill the seedsman's estate ended. Beyond that, dropping abruptly to the west, lay deep wooded coombes, green to the very rocks of the shore.
Louie's age put her at once out of the class of the "new girl" who, in the school tales, sits pathetically on her box and waits for somebody to speak to her. She was twenty-four, and probably only one other student, the copper-haired girl with the long thin neck and the "salt-cellars" showing through her white flannel blouse, who asked her her number and offered to show her the way to her cubicle, was more than twenty-two. Her large black feathered hat (see the first part of the Captain's advice as to how she would make the most of herself), and her expensively simple navy blue coat and skirt down to her toes, further distinguished her among the tweed jackets and ankle-length skirts of the younger girls. No doubt she had her perfect management of these and her numerous other garments from her mother's former interest in the study of Drapery. If the Captain did not think her face pretty, it must be remembered that the Captain had standards of prettiness of his own. Pretty in the professional-beauty sense her irregular mouth and long chin perhaps were not. Her large, clear, pebble-grey eyes at any rate were arresting.
The copper-haired girl, having shown Louie her cubicle, offered to show her the rest of the house also. They began upstairs on the first floor, where the girls slept. The place was an old mansion in the form of a hollow square, and as they came to each latticed embrasure Louie stopped to look at the famous Rainham yew that almost filled the grassgrown inner courtyard. The corridors were dark, and sudden steps where no steps were to have been expected made of the uneven floors a series of booby-traps for those not familiar with them. Memories of the Monmouth Rebellion seemed to linger round the corners and to be shut up in the cupboards of the place. They passed downstairs. Through the doorway of the handsome Restoration façade they saw the yew again, dark beyond the shining flags of the hall. Louie had already been in the reception-room and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's private apartments on the right of the doorway; on the left, she was told, were the quarters of Miss Harriet (who alone of Chesson's daughters remained there) and the staff. The domestics slept at the top of the house; the four male gardeners (all married) occupied the farm a furlong away at the back.
"But wouldn't you like some tea?" said the copper-haired girl. "It's in the dining-room."
"I was told to report myself to Miss Chesson at five," said Louie, looking at her watch.
"Well, you've just time, if you're quick——"
They sought the room where the housekeeper ran cups of tea from the tap of a large and funereal bronze urn.
It was ten minutes to five when Louie entered the dining-room. Before the clock had struck five she had taken a certain position in the college.
She herself hardly knew how it happened. The room was full of noise and chatter, and near Louie, talking louder and making more noise than anybody else, was a lanky child of sixteen, to be a tall blonde beauty in another three or four years' time, but so far only a mass of unadjusted proportions and movements that lacked co-ordination. She had several distinct voices, and in one of these she was now engaged in unabashed mimicry. Louie, who had got her cup of tea, heard a bell-like "Os-trich feathers!" and she was about to put a question to the copper-haired girl when, with a mock reverence and an explosive "Your Ma-jesty!" the child swept backwards into her. She barely saved her cup of tea. The girl gave a quick turn; her Clum—" was changed to a "Sorry!" as she saw a new face, and Louie smiled.
"Your feet were all wrong," Louie said.
The blonde child turned eagerly again.
"Can you do it?" she asked.
The next moment, before Louie could get out "A drawing-room curtsy? Yes," the child had cried: "Girls! Girls! Here's somebody who knows how to do it! Do come and show us!"
"Really?" said Louie, smiling, and handing her cup of tea to the copper-haired girl.
"Yes—come here, Rhoda, and watch (that's my sister—she's to be presented, you know)."
Louie laughed. "Quickly then—I have to see Miss Chesson——"
And, pushed unceremoniously forward, and still in her feathered hat and navy blue costume, Louie made her first bow to her fellow-students at Chesson's in the deep and swanlike genuflexion she had practised with her cousin, Cynthia Scarisbrick, a couple of years before. Then she ran out, smiling.
"How ripping!" she heard somebody say as she did so. "I expect she's been presented."
Louie sought Miss Harriet.
The Principal, a businesslike, damson-complexioned woman of forty-five, with a deerstalker hat on her close-cropped curly hair, asked her what course of study she proposed to take. Louie replied (in other words) that all courses were the same to her. Miss Harriet had had that kind of student before. She asked a few further questions, and then put Louie down for the elementary course. She dismissed her with a marked syllabus and a copy of the Rules.
Louie read the Rules, nodded, as much as to say, "I thought so!" and then laughed. There was no need to ask who had drawn them up; she remembered the frigid way in which Chaff had been put into his place that afternoon. There was a serenity about them that transcended the ordinary imperative mood. "Students do not absent themselves from Morning Prayers or Divine Service without Permission." "Students do not give Orders to the Gardeners or Domestics." "Students do not pass beyond the Bounds of the College (Map appended)." If on occasion students did all of these things, that did not detract from the largior ether in which the Rules were conceived.
Nor did mere evidence to the contrary ever in the least degree abate Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's persuasion that the young ladies of Chesson's, being the daughters of gentlefolk, were by that very fact almost to be trusted to do without Rules at all.
On the following morning Louie, with leggings of doe-skin buttoned to her knees (see the second of the Captain's recommendations for the attire that suited her best), and wearing a wide-pocketed jacket not unlike a man's, began the practical study of Horticulture.
II
She was attached to the "posse" of six girls of which the copper-haired student, whose name was Richenda Earle, was the head. This girl, as the holder of the scholarship mentioned a page or two back, was the single non-fee-paying student in the place. Her father was a bookseller in Westbourne Grove, and she had kept his books for him before coming to Chesson's. She had picked up her knowledge of book-keeping at an obscure and ill-appointed Business School in Holborn, but, her health being anything but robust, she had taken up gardening under the impression that it was an out-of-doors pursuit. It was only this at Chesson's to a strictly limited extent. Whatever students did or did not learn, the output for the market had to be maintained, and this necessitated, for days and days together, work in the twelve long glass-houses, from the humid heat of which the girls came out limp and listless and relaxed. Richenda Earle suffered from these depressions more than most of them, and now only remained at the college because Miss Harriet had held out hopes for her of a place on the staff. She was easily head of all the classes of which she was a member, but was hopelessly incapable of making her personality felt. Add to all this that she was avid of popularity, and that her self-consciousness took the form of making her more assertive (without being a bit more effective) than any girl in the college, and you will see why Louie felt a little sorry for her without