“Here, give it to me!” she would say rather gruffly, grabbing the delicate dress from her mother.
Then off she would rush and put it on all wrong, so that Anna would sigh in a kind of desperation, and would pat, readjust, unfasten and fasten, striving to make peace between wearer and model, whose inimical feelings were evidently mutual.
Came a day when Stephen was suddenly outspoken: “It’s my face,” she announced, “something’s wrong with my face.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Anna, and her cheeks flushed a little, as though the girl’s words had been an offence, then she turned away quickly to hide her expression.
But Stephen had seen that fleeting expression, and she stood very still when her mother had left her, her own face growing heavy and sombre with anger, with a sense of some uncomprehended injustice. She wrenched off the dress and hurled it from her, longing intensely to rend it, to hurt it, longing to hurt herself in the process, yet filled all the while with that sense of injustice. But this mood changed abruptly to one of self pity; she wanted to sit down and weep over Stephen; on a sudden impulse she wanted to pray over Stephen as though she were someone apart, yet terribly personal too in her trouble. Going over to the dress she smoothed it out slowly; it seemed to have acquired an enormous importance; it seemed to have acquired the importance of prayer, the poor, crumpled thing lying crushed and dejected. Yet Stephen, these days, was not given to prayer, God had grown so unreal, so hard to believe in since she had studied Comparative Religion; engrossed in her studies she had somehow mislaid Him. But now, here she was, very wishful to pray, while not knowing how to explain her dilemma: “I’m terribly unhappy, dear, improbable God—” would not be a very propitious beginning. And yet at this moment she was wanting a God and a tangible one, very kind and paternal; a God with a white flowing beard and wide forehead, a benevolent parent Who would lean out of Heaven and turn His face sideways the better to listen from His cloud, upheld by cherubs and angels. What she wanted was a wise old family God, surrounded by endless heavenly relations. In spite of her troubles she began to laugh weakly, and the laughter was good for it killed self pity; nor can it have offended that Venerable Person whose image persists in the hearts of small children.
She donned the new dress with infinite precaution, pulling out its bows and arranging its ruffles. Her large hands were clumsy but now they were willing, very penitent hands full or deep resignation. They fumbled and paused, then continued to fumble with the endless small fastenings so cunningly hidden. She sighed once or twice but the sighs were quite patient, so perhaps in this wise, after all, Stephen prayed.
II
Anna worried continually over her daughter; for one thing Stephen was a social disaster, yet at seventeen many a girl was presented, but the bare idea of this had terrified Stephen, and so it had had to be abandoned. At garden parties she was always a failure, seemingly ill at ease and ungracious. She shook hands much too hard, digging rings into fingers, this from sheer automatic nervous reaction. She spoke not at all, or else gabbled too freely, so that Anna grew vague in her own conversation; all eyes and ears she would be as she listened—it was certainly terribly hard on Anna. But if hard on Anna, it was harder on Stephen who dreaded these festive gatherings intensely; indeed her dread of them lacked all proportion, becoming a kind of unreasoning obsession. Every vestige of self-confidence seemed to desert her, so that Puddle, supposing she happened to be present would find herself grimly comparing this Stephen with the graceful, light-footed, proficient young athlete, with the clever and somewhat opinionated student who was fast outstripping her own powers as a teacher. Yes, Puddle would sit there grimly comparing, and would feel not a little uneasy as she did so. Then something of her pupil’s distress would reach her, so that perforce she would have to share it and as like as not she would want to shake Stephen.
“Good Lord,” she would think, “why can’t she hit back? It’s absurd, it’s outrageous to be so disgruntled by a handful of petty, half-educated yokels—a girl with her brain too, it’s simply outrageous! She’ll have to tackle life more forcibly than this, if she’s not going to let herself go under!”
But Stephen, completely oblivious of Puddle, would be deep in the throes of her old suspicion, the suspicion that had haunted her ever since childhood—she would fancy that people were laughing at her. So sensitive was she, that a half-heard sentence, a word, a glance, made her inwardly crumble. It might well be that people were not even thinking about her, much less discussing her appearance—no good, she would always imagine that the word, the glance, had some purely personal meaning. She would twitch at her hat with inadequate fingers, or walk clumsily, slouching a little as she did so, until Anna would whisper:
“Hold your back up, you’re stooping.”
Or Puddle exclaim crossly: “What on earth’s the matter, Stephen!”
All of which only added to Stephen’s tribulation by making her still more self-conscious.
With other young girls she had nothing in common, while they, in their turn, found her irritating. She was shy to primness regarding certain subjects, and would
