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much taller than most girls her own age. In spite of her height she wore her short, ridiculous tunic unselfconsciously. Her dearest wish was to wear this uniform as long as she could, to stay on at the school forever, to melt, with no intervening gap, from the students’ dining hall to the staff sitting room. Change disturbed her; she was hostile to new girls, could scarcely bear it when old girls came back to be married from the school chapel. Hanging over the stairs with the rest of thegirls, watching the exit of the wedding party from chapel to street, she would wonder how the bride could bear to go off this way, with a man no one knew, having seen school again, having glimpsed the girls on the stairs. When the headmistress said, in chapel, confusing two esteemed poets, “The old order changeth, girls. The Captains and Kings depart. Our King has gone, and now our beloved Kipling has left us,” Helen burst into tears. She did not wish the picture of George V to leave the walls; she did not want Kipling to be “the late.” For a few days afterward, the girls amused themselves by saying, “Helen, listen. The Captains and Kings depart,” so that they could be rewarded, and slightly horrified, by her astonishing grief. But then they stopped, for her shame and silence after such outbursts were disconcerting. It never became a joke, and so had to be abandoned.
    M rs. Holland and her guests settled into an oval tearoom newly done up with chrome and onyx, stuffed with shoppers, smelling of tea, wet coats, and steam heating. Helen looked covertly at Mrs. Holland, fearing another question. None came. The waitress had handed them each a giant, tasselled menu. “I’ll have whatever the rest of them have,” Helen said, not looking at hers.
    “Well,” said Ruth,
“I’ll
have chocolate ice cream with marshmallow. No, wait. Strawberry with pineapple.”
    May forgot her sister. The choice before her was insupportable. “The same as Ruth,” she said, at last, agonized and uncertain.
    Mrs. Holland, who loathed sweets, ordered a sundae, as a friendly gesture, unaware that in the eyes of the girls she haderred. Mothers and their substitutes were expected to drink tea and nibble at flabby pâté sandwiches.
    As soon as their ice cream was before them, Ruth began again about the chocolate bar. “My father never eats chocolate,” she said, quite suddenly. “And he knew it was mine. He’d never touch anything that wasn’t his. It would be stealing.”
    “Maybe it got thrown away,” said May.
    “That’d be the same as stealing,” said Ruth.
    Mrs. Holland said, “Ruth, I do not know what became of your bit of chocolate.”
    Ruth turned to Mrs. Holland her calm brown eyes. “Goodness!” she said. “I never meant to say you took it. Anyway, even if you did make a mistake and eat it up sometime when you were driving around – Well, I mean, who cares? It was only a little piece, half a Cadbury bar in blue paper.”
    “I seldom eat chocolate,” said Mrs. Holland. “If I had seen it, let alone eaten it, I should certainly have remembered.”
    “Then he must have had somebody else with him,” said Ruth. The matter appeared to be settled. She went on eating, savoring every mouthful.
    Mrs. Holland put down her spoon. The trend of this outing, she realized now, could lead only to tears. It was one of the situations in her life – and they were frequent – climaxed by a breakdown. The breakdown would certainly be her own: she wept easily. Ruth, whose character so belied her stormy Latin looks, had rarely wept since babyhood. May, the thin, freckled one, appeared quite strung up about something, but held in by training, by discipline. I lack both, Mrs. Holland thought. As for the big girl, Helen, Mrs. Holland had already dismissed her as cold and stupid. Mrs. Holland said softly,
“Les
larmes d’un adolescent.”
But it doesn’t apply to cold little Canadians, she thought.
    “I know what that means,” said Ruth. She