Instead of saying goodbye to the girl she said:
“Here!” and roughly, since she was exhibiting too much leg, pulled down the girl’s shortish skirt and set to work to lace the unyielding boot on the unyielding shinbone. … After a period of youthful bloom, which would certainly come and as certainly go, this girl would, normally, find herself one of the Mothers of Europe, marriage being due to the period of youthful bloom. … Normally that is to say according to a normality that that day might restore. Of course it mightn’t!
A tepid drop of moisture fell on Valentine’s right knuckle.
“My cousin Bob was killed the day before yesterday,” the girl’s voice said above her head. Valentine bent her head still lower over the boot with the patience that, in educational establishments, you must, if you want to be businesslike and shrewd, acquire and display in face of unusual mental vagaries. … This girl had never had a cousin Bob, or anything else. Pettigul and her two sisters, Pettiguls Two and Three, were all in that Institution at extremely reduced rates precisely because they had not got, apart from their widowed mother, a discoverable relative. The father, a half-pay major, had been killed early in the war. All the mistresses had had to hand in reports on the moral qualities of the Pettiguls, so all the mistresses had this information.
“He gave me his puppy to keep for him before he went out,” the girl said. “It doesn’t seem just!”
Valentine, straightening herself, said:
“I should wash my face if I were you, before I went out. Or you might get yourself taken for a German!” She pulled the girl’s clumsyish blouse straight on her shoulders.
“Try,” she added, “to imagine that you’ve got someone just come back! It’s just as easy and it will make you look more attractive!”
Scurrying along the corridors she said to herself:
“Heaven help me, does it make me look more attractive?”
She caught the Head, as she had anticipated, just on the point of going to her home in Fulham, an unattractive suburb but near a bishop’s palace nevertheless. It seemed somehow appropriate. The lady was episcopally-minded but experienced in the vicissitudes of suburban children: very astonishing some of them unless you took them very much in the lump.
Miss Head had stood behind her table for the first three questions and answers, in an attitude of someone who is a little at bay, but she had sat down just before Valentine had quoted her Shelley at her, and she had now the air of one who is ready to make a night of it. Valentine continued to stand.
“This,” Miss Wanostrocht said very gently, “is a day on which one might … take steps … that might influence one’s whole life.”
“That’s,” Valentine answered, “exactly why I’ve come to you. I want to know what that woman said to you so as to know where I stand before I take a step.”
The Head said:
“I had to let the girls go. I don’t mind saying that you are very valuable to me. The Governors—I had an express from Lord Boulnois—ordered them to be given a holiday tomorrow. It’s very inconsistent. But that makes it all the. …”
She stopped. Valentine said to herself:
“By Jove, I don’t know anything about men; but how little I know about women. What’s she getting at?”
She added:
“She’s nervous. She must be wanting to say something she thinks I won’t like!”
She said chivalrously:
“I don’t believe anybody could have kept those girls in today. It’s a thing one has no experience of. There’s never been a day like this before.”
Out there in Piccadilly there would be seething mobs shoulder to shoulder: she had never seen the Nelson column stand out of a solid mass. They might roast oxen whole in the Strand: Whitechapel would be seething, enamelled iron advertisements looking down on millions of bowler hats. All sordid and immense London stretched out under her gaze. She felt herself of London as the grouse feels itself of the heather, and there she was in an emptied suburb looking at two pink carnations. Dyed probably: offering of Lord Boulnois to Miss Wanostrocht! You never saw a natural-grown carnation that shade!
She said:
“I’d be glad to know what that woman—Lady Macmaster—told you.”
Miss Wanostrocht looked down at her hands. She had the little-fingers hooked together, the hands back to back; it was a demoded gesture. … Girton of 1897, Valentine thought. Indulged in by the thoughtfully blonde. … Fair girl graduates the sympathetic comic papers of those days had called them. It pointed to a long sitting. Well, she, Valentine, was not going to brusque the issue! … French-derived expression that. But how would you put it otherwise?
Miss Wanostrocht said:
“I sat at the feet of your father!”
“You see!” Valentine said to herself. “But she must then have gone to Oxford, not Newnham!” She could not remember whether there had been woman’s colleges at Oxford as early as 1895 or 1897. There must have been.
“The greatest Teacher. … The greatest influence in the world,” Miss Wanostrocht said.
It was queer, Valentine thought: This woman had known all about her—at any rate all about her distinguished descent all the time she, Valentine, had been Physical Instructress at that Great Public School (Girls’). Yet except for an invariable courtesy such as she imagined Generals might show to noncommissioned officers, Miss Wanostrocht had hitherto taken no more notice of her than she might have taken of a superior parlourmaid. On the other hand she had let Valentine arrange her physical training exactly as she liked: without any interference.
“We used to hear,” Miss Wanostrocht said, “how he spoke Latin with you and your brother from the day of your births. … He used to be regarded as eccentric, but how right! …
