Palladian Read Free Page A

crookedly where and as it always had, and a curtain flapped idly over the papers on the writing-table, which were pretty well held down, however, by pieces of stone from the Acropolis.
    ‘It must be time for prayers …’ Mrs Turner rose and smoothed – or hoped to smooth – her skirt, and, standing before the mirror, twisted one frond of hair after another into the supporting combs and stabbed-in hairpins and patted gently. ‘Are you coming in, dear? I think it would be rather nice before you go away … unless you are tired and would … I expect you are very tired … stay quietly here and when I come back Ethel shall bring us some Benger’s ah, there’s the bell.’
    ‘But I should like to come,’ said Cassandra.
    Apart from wishing to please Mrs Turner, it was right to be harrowed by such an occasion. It would be like her last day at school all over again.
    ‘Thank you, Alma,’ said Mrs Turner, taking her prayer-book from the head girl, who waited outside her door and followed her into the hall. Cassandra stayed at the back, feeling that there was no especial place for her there any more, except to Mrs Turner, whose love was none the less for being manifested in commonplace ways, who approved of human-nature, reserving intolerance for the truly intolerable.
    Cassandra looked about her, hoping to experience nostalgia, at the English mistress, with her head on one side and neck flushed, singing furiously; at Mademoiselle with her moustache growing more emphasised with the years; at the reproduction of Saint Francis and the Birds – a threadbare little picture. This evening, there was no Charity Chapter or ‘O God Our Help’ toplay delightfully upon her nerves, merely half a dozen verses of Old Testament genealogy and a commonplace hymn, much open to girlish parody, ‘O For a Faith That Will Not Shrink’.
    ‘The trouble is,’ she thought, ‘that I am dead and indifferent to all this, grown out of it and ready for something new. The opportunity for emotion comes when the emotion is dead.’
    ‘A faith that keeps the narrow way. Cassie Dashwood’s at the back,’ sang one prefect to another.
    ‘Coming to be on the staff maybe,’ Alma replied, her eyes fixed innocently on her hymn-book.
    ‘She’s going to be a governess somewhere.’
    ‘What a corny sort of job – Amen,’ sang Alma, who went a great deal to the cinema in the holidays.
    ‘How young the prefects look!’ Cassandra was thinking. ‘They are only children.’ When she had come here first as a little girl, they had seemed women to her, some of them with their hair up – Helen Turner herself, with plaited circles clapped over her ears, one of the ugliest of hair fashions. But it had given them a look of maturity, which none of the girls had now.
    ‘Amen,’ warbled the English mistress, closing her eyes at the same time as her hymn-book; her singing done, the red subsided at her neck. Mademoiselle, it was understood, was there to help keep order, not to assist in the Protestant devotions. She stood with her hands folded on her abdomen, looking as if she were waiting for them to finish.
    Mrs Turner went down heavily on her embroidered hassock and began to pray. One of the prefects leant forward and poked with her hymn-book at two juniors whose plaits hung closely together as they whispered.
    Mademoiselle made a sort of shelter for her eyes with one hand, but rather as if to rest herself from the glare of the lights than to commune with her maker.
    ‘And strengthen, O Lord,’ ordered Mrs Turner, ‘those who are going out from our midst into the world. Keep them from all harm and deliver them from temptation.’
    When Mrs Turner had dismissed the girls to their beds and said good night to the mistress on duty, she took Cassandra back to her sitting-room, where two glasses of Benger’s had been placed on a tray by the fire.
    ‘I think I shall write to Margaret to ask her to give you a good look-over when you get there,’ she said, as