"They are neither of them a patch on Lady Isabel, are they?"
"They are at the awkward age," laughed the lady to whom he was talking. "One of them sat next to you at lunch, didn't she?"
"Yes. Not quite so natural as the other children. That little, red-haired American girl, now – a regular child – "
Alex, with a face grown suddenly scarlet, left Barbara, shyly, and Cedric, briefly, to thank their hostess for the pleasant day they had spent.
A new, and far more painful self-consciousness than any she had yet known, hampered her tongue and her movements, until they were safely in the pony-carriage half-way down the drive.
"They are nice, aren't they?" said Barbara. "I'm sure they are nicer than Queenie."
"No, they aren't," Alex contradicted mechanically.
"Well, Marie and Diana are, anyway." She looked slyly at Cedric. "Don't you think so, Cedric?"
"How can I tell whether they are any nicer, as you call it, than another kid whom I've never seen?" inquired Cedric reasonably.
"But didn't you like Marie?"
"She's all right."
Barbara giggled in the way most disliked by her family, the authorities of whom stigmatized the habit as "vulgar," and Cedric said severely:
"I shouldn't think decent girls would want to play with you at all, if you don't leave off that idiotic trick of cackling."
But Barbara, who was not at all easily crushed, continued to giggle silently at intervals.
"Why are you so silly?" Alex asked her crossly, as they were going to bed that night.
She and Barbara shared a room at Fiveapples Farm.
Barbara whined the inevitable contradiction, "I'm not silly," but added immediately, "you wouldn't be so cross, if you knew what I know. I expect you'd laugh too."
"Well, what is it?"
"I shan't tell you."
Alex was not particularly curious, but she had been the nursery autocrat too long to be able to endure resistance to her command.
"Tell me at once, Barbara."
"No, I won't."
"Yes, you will. Well, what is it about?" said Alex, changing her tactics.
"It's about Cedric."
"Is he in a scrape?"
"No, it's just something he did."
"What? Did he tell you about it?"
"Oh, no. He doesn't know I know. He'd be furious if he did, I expect."
"Who told you? Does any one else know?"
"Nobody told me. One other person knows," giggled Barbara, jumping up and down in her petticoat.
"Keep still, you'll have the candle over. Who's the other person who knows?"
"Guess."
"Oh, I can't; don't be so silly. I am not going to ask you any more."
"Well," said Barbara in a great hurry, "it's Marie Munroe, then; it's about her."
"What about her? She didn't take any notice of any one except Cedric, and I think it was very rude and stupid of her."
"It was Cedric's doing much more than hers," Barbara said shrewdly. "I think he thinks he is in love with her. I saw them in the shrubbery when we were playing hide-and-seek; and – what do you think, Alex?"
"Well, what?"
"Cedric kissed her – I saw him."
"Then," said Alex, "it was perfectly hateful of him and of Marie and of you."
"Why of me?" shrieked Barbara in a high key of indignation. "What have I done, I should like to know?"
"You'd no business to say anything about it. Put out the candle, Barbara, I'm going to get into bed."
In the darkness Alex lay with her mind in a tumult. It seemed to her incredible that her brother, whom she had always supposed to despise every form of sentimentality, as he did any display of feeling on the part of his family, should have wanted to kiss little, red-haired Marie, whom he had only known for one day, and who was by far the least pretty of any of the three Munroe sisters. "And to kiss her in the shrubbery like that!"
Alex felt disgusted and indignant. She thought about it for a long while before she went to sleep, although she would gladly have dismissed the incident from her mind. Most of all, perhaps, she was filled with astonishment. Why should any one want to kiss Marie Munroe?
In the depths of her heart was another wonder which she never formulated even to herself, and of which she would, for very shame, have strenuously denied the existence.
Why had she not the same mysterious attraction as un-beautiful little Marie? Alex knew instinctively that it would never have occurred, say, to Noel Cardew – to ask her if he might kiss her. She did not want him to – would have been shocked and indignant at the mere idea – but, unconsciously, she wished that he had wanted to.
VI
The End of an Era
No salient landmarks ever seemed to Alex to render eventful the two and a half years that elapsed between those summer holidays at Fiveapples Farm and her final departure from the Liège convent to begin her grown-up life at home.
The re-arrangement of the day's routine consequent on the beginning of the winter half-year caused her to miss Queenie less acutely than she had done when she first came home for the holidays, and with Queenie's absence there were fewer revolts against convent law, and less disfavour from the authorities.
She made no other great friends. Marie Munroe showed her a marked friendliness at first, but Alex could not forget that giggling revelation of Barbara's, and shrank from her advances unmistakably. She had very little in common with her French contemporaries, and knew that they thought her English accent and absence of proficiency in needlework, marks of eccentricity and of bad form, so that she became self-conscious and aggressive before them.
She was hardly aware of her own intense loneliness – the poignant realization of it was to come later – but the want of any channel of self-expression for her over-developed emotional capabilities produced in her a species of permanent discontent that reacted on her health and on her spirits, so that she got the reputation, least enviable of any in schoolgirl circles, of being "a tragedy queen."
Her morose pallor, partly the result of an under-vitalized system, and partly of her total lack of any interest in her surroundings, were considered fair game.
"Voyez, Alex! Elle a son air bête aujourd'hui."
"A qui l'enterrement, Alex?"
They were quite good-humoured, and did not mean to hurt her. It was not their fault that such pin-pricks stabbed her and sent her away to cry over her own friendlessness until she felt sick and exhausted.
She did not expend on any one else the extravagant worship bestowed upon Queenie Torrance. For a year she wrote to Queenie throughout the holidays, and received meagre and unsatisfactory replies, and then gradually the correspondence ceased altogether, and Alex only looked forward with an occasional vague curiosity to the possibility of meeting Queenie again in London, on the terms of equality symbolized by their both being "grown-up."
During her last year at school, lack of intimate intercourse with any one, and the languid sentimentality of adolescence, made her take for the first time some interest in religion as understood at the convent. She prolonged her weekly confession, which had hitherto been a matter of routine to be got through as rapidly as possible, in order to obtain the solace of talking about herself, and derived a certain tepid pleasure in minutely following and applying to herself the more anecdotal portions of the New Testament.
For a time, it seemed to her that she had found a refuge.
Then came the affair of the examination. Alex, in her last term, and taking part in the