Sufferers are seldom sweet-tempered; and Laura formed no exception. Pin, her most frequent companion, had to bear the brunt of her acrimony: hence the two were soon at war again. For Pin was tactless, and took small heed of her sister’s grumpy moods, save to cavil at them. Laura’s buttoned-upness, for instance, and her love of solitude, were perverse leanings to Pin’s mind; and she spoke out against them with the assurance of one who has public opinion at his back. Laura retaliated by falling foul of little personal traits in Pin: a nervous habit she had of clearing her throat—her very walk. They quarrelled passionately, having branched as far apart as the endpoints of what is ultimately to be a triangle, between which the connecting lines have not yet been drawn.
Sometimes they even came to blows.
“I’ll fetch your ma to you—that I will!” threatened Sarah, called by the noise of the scuffle. “Great girls like you—fightin’ like bandicoots! You ought to be downright ashamed o’ yourselves.”
“I don’t know what’s come over you two, I’m sure,” scolded Mother, when the combatants had been parted and brought before her in the kitchen, where she was rolling pastry. “You never used to go on like this. Pin, stop that noise. Do you want to deafen me?”
“She hit me first,” sobbed Pin. “It’s always Laura who begins.”
“I’ll teach her to cheek me like that!”
“Well, all I can say is,” said Mother exasperated, and pushed a lock of hair off her perspiring forehead with the back of her hand. “All I say is, big girls as you are, you deserve to have the nonsense whipped out of you. As for you, Laura, if this is your only return for all the money I’ve spent on you, then I wish from my heart you’d never seen the inside of that Melbourne school.”
“How pretty your eyes look, mother, when your eyelashes get floury!” said Laura, struck by the vivid contrast of black and white. She merely stated the fact, without intent to flatter, her anger being given to puffing out as suddenly as it kindled.
“Oh, get along with you!” said Mother, at the same time skilfully lifting and turning a large, thin sheet of paste. “You can’t get round me like that.”
“You used to have nice, ladylike manners,” she said on another occasion, when Laura, summoned to the drawing-room to see a visitor, had in Mother’s eyes disgraced them both. “Now, you’ve no more idea how to behave than a country bumpkin. You sit there, like a stock or a stone, as if you didn’t know how to open your mouth.”—Mother was very cross.
“I didn’t want to see that old frump anyhow,” retorted Laura, who inclined to charge the inhabitants of the township with an extreme provinciality. “And what else was there to say, but yes or no? She asked me all things I didn’t know anything about. You don’t want me to tell stories, I suppose?”
“Well, if a child of mine doesn’t know the difference between being polite and telling stories,” said Mother, completely outraged, “then, all I can say is, it’s a … a great shame!” she wound up lamely, after the fashion of hot-tempered people who begin a sentence without being clear how they are going to end it. “You were a nice enough child once. If only I’d never let you leave home.”
This jeremiad was repeated by Mother and chorused by the rest till Laura grew incensed. She was roused to defend her present self, at the cost of her past perfections; and this gave rise to new dissensions.
So that in spite of what she had to face at school, she was not altogether sorry, when the time came, to turn her back on her unknowing and hence unsympathetic relations. She journeyed to Melbourne on one of those pleasant winter days when the sun shines from morning till night in a cloudless sky, and the chief mark of the season is the extraordinary greenness of the grass; returned a pale, determined, lanky girl, full of the grimmest resolutions.
The first few days were like a bad dream. The absence of Evelyn came home to her in all its crushing force. A gap yawned drearily where Evelyn had been—but then, she had been everywhere. There was now a kind of emptiness about the great school—except for memories, which cropped up at each turn. Laura was in a strange room, with strange, indifferent girls; and for a time she felt as lonely as she had done in those unthinkable days when she was still the poor little green “new chum.”
Her companions were not wilfully unkind to her—her last extravagance had been foolish, not criminal—and two or three were even sorry for the woebegone figure she cut. But her idolatrous attachment to Evelyn had been the means of again drawing round her one of those magic circles, which held her schoolfellows at a distance. And the aroma of her eccentricity still clung to her. The members of her class were deep in study, too; little was now thought or spoken of but the approaching examinations. And her first grief over, Laura set her teeth and flung herself on her lessons like a dog on a bone, endeavouring to pack the conscientious work of twelve months into less than six.
The days were feverish with energy. But at night the loneliness returned, and was only the more intense because, for some hours on end, she had been able to forget it.
On one such night when she lay wakeful, haunted by the prospect of failure, she turned over the leaves of her Bible—she had been memorising her weekly portion—and read, not as a school-task, but for herself. By chance she lighted on the Fourteenth Chapter of St. John, and the familiar, honey-sweet words fell
