CHAPTER II

The Convent of the Sacred Heart was a curiously cloistral structure, situated in a manner quite unanticipated by its founders, in the spreading outskirts of the city itself. It was old as age went in Carrington--its wooden turrets and wasteful curves testified to that--and it had been built at a time when no one dreamed that the fields and pastures and wooded stretches which lay around the convent’s site would be filled within thirty years by prosperous looking residences, sleek lawns and neat hedges. But so it was. As the red brick of the convent walls grew tawny brown with age, the city crept up around them and only the great expanse of its own grounds and that five-foot wall remained to keep the peace of the cloister. But the wall was high and the pine trees within it thickly green in both winter and summer, and the convent, growing richer every year as its property increased in value, gave as little recognition as possible to the modernity outside its gates. It had abandoned its huge windmill for modern plumbing, gradually gas had supplanted lamps and electric wiring supplanted gas--but there the obvious changes stopped. The parlor was still the severe old Victorian parlor of its first furnishing, the study hall still had desks with lid tops and the stone flagging of the corridors was hollowed with the footsteps of thirty-five years. Its shabby permanency gave it peace and aristocracy and this atmosphere was breathed by the nuns themselves, for they, like the place, were cloistered. There were those among them who had been in the convent precincts for thirty years--those whose only voyage outside had been the most inconspicuous and hurried progress from one convent to another, when the Order had transferred them. There were those who came from France, where, until the exile of priests and nuns, they had taught the children of the aristocracy in high walled convents like this one; those who had come from England; and those who in the early part of their lives must have been simple American children. But no matter where they had come from, they were bound together by the same experiences and qualities now--tremendous religious devotion, a gentle love of seclusion and a fine, faint flavor of aristocracy of birth and education, for the order was no common order. It demanded a background of breeding and learning in its novices, and indeed a substantial dowry for them. All this because it devoted itself to the bringing up of ladies and could not risk the wrong kind of instruction for them.

The city, in a worldly, not too serious, way, was proud of its convent. It was proud of its cloistral bearing, of its aristocratic refusal to market even the smallest of its lots, as a tightfisted money maker may respect and be fond of some unworldly old lady who refuses to measure the world by his measure of dollars and cents. The esteem in which the convent was held was regardless of creed. Catholic and Protestant alike with pride pointed out the walled domain to visitors--and Catholics and Protestants alike tried to enter their daughters into its limited classes, if they or the daughters had a taste for that sort of education.

But the classes were limited and the work, after all, not college preparatory, so the convent did not compete seriously with the smart High School displaying itself, a quarter of a mile away, in the middle of its well kept lawns and two tennis courts (supported by private subscription). The High School did not consider the convent at all a competitor any more than the convent would have considered itself one. The flavor of the convent was lost in the general breeziness and bustle of the High School. From October until June its halls and classrooms swarmed with life, with restlessness, with innovations in everything from hair dressing to pedagogy. Its daily six hour-periods were jammed with the efforts of teachers and supervisors and the propagandists of some cause or other, and distinguished visitors and class leaders came, too, to impress facts and emotions upon eight hundred boys and girls. From Monday until Friday it seethed with excitement, and on Saturday the basket ball games in the perfectly equipped gymnasium or the crowds cheering the football games in the field at the back, and the parties in the evenings kept the school humming.

One period of the academic year, of course, transcended all others in interest and in holiday excitement. That was the week before Commencement, when the festivities attendant on that event threw the whole building into confusion and anticipation. Commencement week had the evil habit of being preceded by a week of “exams”--a rather nerve-racking time for all the classes, for a great deal of information had to be investigated in the bright and facile young minds under the High School’s control. Study became very real for a week or so, scholarship took on new dignity, and the amazing cleverness of both teachers and students showed through the blur of distractions. In spite of all their other interests, the students seemed to have learned a great deal about very definite subjects and they wrote, for the most part, very creditable examination papers and took due pride in them. Then the week passed and the spirit changed. The academic standard fell by the wayside among the things that counted not. What counted was to be pretty, to be attractive, to be a football hero (or at least on a class team), to be a good dancer, to have had the greatest number of “bids” to the Commencement dance or to the dance the Juniors gave to the Seniors, or to have a part in the class play.

On the night when Mother Fénelon talked to Cecily and soothed her vague nervousness about marriage, the great High School building, half a mile away, was ablaze with light. It was the occasion of occasions in the school social year--the Senior dance. On the wide macadam street automobiles were parked in long lines and through the open windows of the second floor gymnasium an orchestra was playing indefatigably. Young girls in gay taffeta dance frocks, made scrupulously like the fashionable evening dresses of older women, and boys in well brushed and pressed clothes were dancing, and dancing well, with a spirit and abandonment to enjoyment lacking in many an older party. Yet, in the midst of all the color and gayety a few of these adolescents struck a higher note of brilliance than the rest, and the most conspicuous was a girl in a cerise frock. Her dress was cut a little lower than the others, and her hair, bunched low over her ears like most of the rest, managed to make itself individual by being drawn tightly across her pretty forehead, accentuating its whiteness and height. She had one other triumph of individuality. She had a feather fan, as cerise as her gown, and completely out of keeping as it was, it still made her an irresistible picture. The mammoth fan, the short, brilliant little skirt, the restless feet and ankles and great bunches of black hair made her a model for a poster. She seemed fully conscious of her effect and of her overcrowded program of dances, for it was as if her laugh and vivacity led the others by natural right. It was one of her moments of triumph and she never wasted them.

Florence Horton, commonly known as “Fliss,” had gone through High School on sheer strength of wit. She was the only child of rather inconsequent parents whom she ruled completely. They had given her no social position so, in her early teens, she had set about making one for herself. And so far she had done it. “Fliss” went everywhere with the girls of her age who came from wealthy and exclusive families, used their automobiles, dined at their homes, was a favorite with their fathers and mothers, and called their servants and chauffeurs by their first names. She did it by sheer virtue of the color in her which, like the color in the cerise dress, was outrageous, unsuitable and immensely stimulating.

In her academic work she was invariably in difficulties. There was not a teacher who was not perfectly aware that Fliss studied practically not at all. She “bluffed” continually. But her bluff was so skillful and sometimes approximated so closely to real intelligence on the subject involved that it was impossible to drop her altogether. Now and then she failed in an examination, tutored frantically and made the work up again, and here she was, graduating with the rest, though there had been some dubious hours in this last week when it had taken several consultations between the chemistry teacher and his assistant to decide to give her passing credits. She was through with school. College was an impossibility from the standpoint of work, even if she could have afforded to go, and the only thing which might have allured her--a year at some fashionable Hudson River boarding school--was quite out of her range as being even more expensive than college. So Fliss made the best of it and declared that she was glad to be through with books forever, and that she meant for the rest of her life to have a good time.

It appeared that there would be plenty of people to give it to her. She had already managed to get the attention of several young men who were well past the High School age, and, though she danced and coquetted with the younger boys too, she was more interested in those slightly older than herself. Old and young, and brilliant, she was a perfect type of the woman who matures early and ages so imperceptibly that her reign is long.

She was out in the hall now with Gordon Ames and they sat on the top of the oiled stairs in semi-darkness. The music had started but Gordon ignored Fliss’s impatient little toe tapping on the step beneath her.

“I wish I didn’t have to go to college,” he grumbled.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll stay here and flirt with every boy in town.”

“Aren’t you horrid, Gordon Ames!” Fliss pouted with great pleasure.

“You know you will--and then some day somebody’ll marry you and there I’ll be off at college.”

“I might have something to say about that,” said Fliss, “and I haven’t any intention of getting married. I don’t want to marry. I’m going to stay home, and after a while, maybe I’ll do something--or go on the stage.”

“You’d better keep away from that,” said Gordon with much meaning and manly wisdom in his voice.

“I think I’d like it maybe.”

“Yes, you would.” He changed the subject impatiently. “Fliss, will you wear my frat pin?”

Fliss patted her knee with the ostrich fan, and regarded the pin. It was set with pearls in the most extravagant manner that a fraternity pin could be. But she hesitated.

“You know what that always means to everybody--all the girls laugh and talk----”

“That’s what I’d like it to mean--that we’re engaged.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be engaged.”

“I suppose it would have to be awfully indefinite. But it doesn’t have to mean that we’re engaged, just to wear my pin. Lots of girls wear them when they don’t mean a single thing. Please.”

She took the pin from him yieldingly, with a graceful little smile of pleasure and gratitude playing about her mouth. The boy was watching her closely and his face flushed suddenly at her smile.

“And because it’s our last night,” he whispered awkwardly, “you’ll let me kiss you----”

But he did not wait for permission. Most of the boys did not with Fliss. Fliss might not give you the kiss you wanted when you wanted it, but she could be kissed and they knew it. Usually they were silly enough, little giggling kisses, but to-night there was a new quality in Gordon. Fliss felt it and pulled herself away, a little abashed. But most of all Gordon seemed to feel it himself, for he released her and stood up suddenly, flushed and silent.

“I think this is what it is to be in love--really,” he said, soberly.

But she had recovered her gay little self.

“If you act like that another time, I’ll stop speaking to you, Gordon,” she said, “and I’m going down to dance.”

They went down into the crowded hall, but the boy did not dance again. Going home later, he crowded into the back of a big touring car with Fliss and three other couples of boys and girls, all excited and laughing, sitting on each other’s laps and indulging in foolish little caresses and rebuffs. He did not touch Fliss.

And Fliss, still later, sat on the edge of the bed in the room of a friend where she was spending the night. It was a rather luxurious room and the two girls made a lovely picture against its background. They discussed the dance and the boys.

“Oh, they are just boys,” said Fliss, somewhat slightingly. “You’ll see a different type in the men who come to college dances, I suppose. Real men.”

“I wish you were coming to college, Fliss.”

“Too much work.”

“But if you stay on here you’ll probably just marry----”

Fliss grew suddenly angry. “That’s the second time I’ve been told that to-night and it is perfectly absurd. Why should I marry just because I don’t go to college?”

Her friend ruminated a little. She was a pretty girl herself and a thoughtful one.

“I thought you might like to,” she answered simply. “And when there’s nothing much else to do, the girls all seem to----”

“Because they are stupid,” flashed Fliss, “of course they do. Like Dorothy Maynard. And then they have babies and get fat and stop dancing and don’t care about anything except babies and food. If I get married I won’t do that sort of thing anyhow. I won’t get married unless I’m sure I won’t have to. Anyway who could I marry?”

“You’d probably find some one.” The other girl slipped into her bed. “My feet are tired,” she added, “but I wish I could dance to that orchestra forever.”

Fliss did not answer. She sat, watching her image in the pier glass opposite her. It was a strangely young image for one possessed of such crowding thoughts.