The E. M. Delafield Boxed Set - 6 Novels in One Edition - E. M. Delafield

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me at once, Zella, what is the matter."

      "Could I tell you privately?"

      By this time the girls were all listening eagerly, and Zella was enjoying herself.

      "You had better overcome human respect, and tell me quite simply and naturally what you have done to yourself, I think."

      "It was for Reverend Mother's Feast," faltered the ingenuous Zella, looking down. "What?"

      Zella raised her grey eyes with an innocently rapt expression.

      It was my first Act of Mortification."

      She took off her shoe and extracted a small glass marble.

      She had almost expected that an emotionally shaken Mother Veronica would embrace her then and there, and that the girls would at least keep a touched and reverent silence, and she was utterly unprepared for the gale of merriment that broke out all round her on the instant of this revelation.

      She stood scarlet, rooted to the spot, and overwhelmed with an appalling sense of disaster.

      Even the humourless face of Mother Veronica was smiling. She was English, and had a great deal of common-sense, with little imagination.

      In the space of a second or two, however, she had checked her amusement, and silenced that of the children by smartly clapping her hands together. The accustomed signal hushed them at once, and she spoke briefly.

      "That will do now. Zella will know better another time, and there is nothing to make such a noise about. Go and ring the bell for prayers, Mary."

      Mary departed, still giggling violently, and the girls, conscious of approaching bedtime, broke out into volubility again.

      Zella was fighting tears of rage and mortification. Mother Veronica spoke to her in a low voice, and not unkindly:

      "You mustn't take this little humiliation to heart so much, child. Offer it up, instead of the marble in your shoe."

      She rather obviously repressed an inclination to smile again.

      "You'll learn better in time, dear, but that is not the sort of thing that our Lord wants of you just at present."

      Zella would have liked to say, " How do you know?" but was literally unable to speak.

      "Try and keep silence in the ranks, and eat up your meat at dinner instead of leaving it on your plate," said Mother Veronica in tones of unsympathetic common-sense, "and do not play foolish pranks that might injure your health."

      "The saints did," retorted Zella in a choked voice.

      "You are not a saint," caustically replied Mother Veronica, "and I am afraid you are a very self-righteous little girl."

      XV

       Table of Contents

      SISTER VERONICA, with singular ineptness, had selected perhaps, of all others, the adjective least applicable to Zella, in calling her self-righteous.

      A lamentable lack of self-confidence lay at the back of all the timid and generally ill-judged attempts at self-assertion which marked Zella's convent days. She was in the midst of alien standards, and she knew it, nor did her most strenuous efforts ever succeed in conforming her to the type which she. both aimed at and despised.

      Her first year at the convent seemed to Zella to be a succession of failures.

      Her education left her far behind the requirements of the convent teaching, limited and old-fashioned though it was; and however much her knowledge of French might delight Mere Jeanne, she knew instinctively that the girls looked upon it as a sort of affectation, not to be alluded to, and only excusable on the grounds that she had "heaps of foreign blood in her."

      Her Protestantism in time came to be overlooked; her foreign name and her proficiency in English composition, never.

      Zella had all her life calmly taken it for granted that she was clever. At the convent, for the first time, she began to waver in this opinion. It was so obvious that no one else shared it. Her class mistress encouraged her gently by saying: "You have had great disadvantages, no doubt, dear, but I am sure you will make up for lost time now."

      But Zella found it no easier to apply herself to tasks which seemed extremely and unvaryingly dull, than it had been in Muriel Lloyd-Evans's schoolroom. The only information which appeared to be of the least use in her class work was, in fact, that which she had reluctantly imbibed from the teaching of the strenuous Miss Vincent.

      She was almost always at the bottom of her class, and tried to find uneasy consolation in the remembrance that in all school stories the clever, but incurably idle, heroine invariably occupied the same position until some brilliant, wayward impulse would send her suddenly to the head of the school. In the depths of her heart, however, Zella was aware that no sudden effort, however brilliant, would ever enable her to acquire and retain the curiously tabulated and compressed amount of information which appeared to constitute education.

      Zella found herself much perplexed by this question of cleverness. It was an accepted convention that one or two of the girls were "clever."

      "Dorothy Brady is awfully clever," she once heard, to her surprise.

      "What sort of way?"

      "Oh, every way. She always knows the lesson, and yet her prep. never takes long; and look how well she

      It was true that Dorothy could play "La Fileuse de Raff," and many other compositions of similar calibre, faultlessly, and her copies of water-colours "from the flat" were almost indistinguishable from the originals. (Drawing from casts was not encouraged, as bearing a possible relationship to statues, and thus leading, by subtle degrees, to the human form.)

      Zella herself frequently struck wrong notes at the piano, almost always played faster than the metronome indicated, and never succeeded in toning her washes of colour to the palely graduated tints of the copy before her.

      "It is true that I can't 'do ' things," she told herself fiercely, "and that Dorothy can. There's nothing I'm any good at, except talking French; and that isn't because I ever learnt it, but simply because it's been talked all round me ever since I was born. Why do I think I am clever, and that she's not? I'm a fool, really; I can't do anything well."

      Yet the certainty remained, obstinate, ineradicable, that she possessed some utterly indefinable quality which was lacking in her companions, and which set her mentally, infinitely above them.

      But not till long after her school days were past did Zella learn to associate this instinct of latent superiority with the idea of creative power.

      At the convent she continued to be, at least in her own estimation, a failure. Humility is a much-abused term, and can only be applied to Zella's attitude of mind with reservation, since it was engendered by her passionate conviction that for her to be anything but first in the estimation of those around her, was for her to be a failure.

      Nor were minor humiliations spared her.

      She made no special friends.

      In spite of the stringent convent regulations as to preferences, it was acknowledged even by the authorities that certain friendships might be tolerated, or even encouraged, within bounds. If a Child of Mary was supposed to exert a good influence over some more unregenerate companion, the friendship was smiled upon. The two might spend the recreations together, of course in the company of the inevitable third, without being called to order by the sharp rebuke of Mere Pauline: "Vous deux là-bas! il ne faut pas vous rechercher comme cela. C'est défendu." Or Mother Veronica's monotonous "Not two together, children. You must find a third at once, please."

      Zella was often called upon to redeem the character of a tête-à-tête by converting it into a trio, because she was too sensitive to take any real part in a conversation where she knew herself unwanted, and at the same time too self-conscious and too much alive to the absurdity of her position not

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