And Both Were Young: Chapter 2

“Girls! The light bell rang five minutes ago. Just because I wasn’t able to get here sooner is no reason for you to be out of bed. Get in at once. Do you all want deportment marks?”

Tears of mirth were streaming down Jackie’s face, and even Flip felt an ache of laughter in her chest.

Gloria clicked her tongue around inside her mouth and suddenly she was grinning with the four front teeth outside her lips. It was a macabre and horrible grimace.

Erna, Jackie, and Sally agreed vociferously.

She knew already that the one certain thing in an uncertain world was that time always passed; but as day followed day, each one exactly like the other, she felt that nothing, not even time, could put an end to their unbearable monotony.

There was neither welcome nor rebuff in his voice, but Flip felt that she had been rejected and she said haughtily, “I’m sorry I’m not welcome. I’ll leave at once.”

There was neither welcome nor rebuff in his voice, but Flip felt that she had been rejected and she said haughtily, “I’m sorry I’m not welcome. I’ll leave at once.”

“No, don’t go, it’s good to see you. I know I sounded inhospitable, but come and sit down.”

“Well, she manages to let me know that they talk on the phone all the time, and she flies to meet him whenever she can. She condescends to write me once a week.”

Flip shook her head vehemently.

Not like Eunice, the kind of beautiful that hits you in the teeth so you can’t escape it. Subtle. And it was inside beauty, too.

She started away but turned back and said tentatively, “At home I’m called Flip...” and waited.

“You’ve probably been mooning down in that chapel again. I think it’s sacrilegious.”

One had wangled a big box of chocolates into the common room with the help of a cousin who lived in Montreux.

“I expect I’ll have to,” Flip agreed mournfully and with trepidation.

“I’ll do what I can to keep it from being too awful,” Gloria promised her magnanimously.

It was a gray day with little tendrils of fog curled here and there about the trees.

Behind the playing fields was the most desolate spot around the school. It was rocky ground with little life; the grass was neither long nor short; just ragged and untidy and a dull rust brown in color.

Esmée stood up while Flip lay prostrate on the ground, gasping and trying to get her breath back.

“Now the inoculation. All the new girls have to be inoculated, not just you, Pill. Did you get the matches, Jack?”

Flip turned her head away as Gloria took her arm and jabbed at it gingerly with the needle, exclaiming with chagrined surprise, “It didn’t go in.”

Erna gave her a boisterous shove.

She remembered reading in a book once about the way you used to see gibbets along the desolate highways in England long ago; and as you drove along you would sometimes see a dead highwayman, black and awful, strung up on one of the gibbets, as a warning to thieves and murderers.

She felt that this tree against which she was being forced to stand was like one of those old gallows, and for a shuddering moment her imagination told her it might have been used for that very purpose.

By divesting her of any voluntary action they had also divested her of any sense of responsibility.

Through her blindfold she could not see the fog that was beginning to straggle in woolly-looking streamers about the playing fields and the grounds, but she could feel the damp seeping through her blazer and skirt and her body grow numb.

Erna had bound her tightly and her muscles began to ache from standing, and the tautened stocking-rope dug into the flesh of her wrists and ankles, and the darkness became oppressive instead of peaceful.

At first she thought the footsteps were going to go on by, that whoever it was would pass without seeing her; but then she heard a low exclamation and felt deft fingers untying the blindfold and the gag.

“You look as though you’d been beset by highwaymen. What happened?”

Flip grinned and shook out her gangly legs.

Flip looked at them, enthralled.

The gong for tea began to ring. It reverberated even back into Madame Perceval’s room as the maid rode up and down in the skeleton of the elevator.

Flip bit into a small and succulent cake, crisp layers of something filled with mocha cream.

She stood decorously behind her chair and waited for Mlle. Dragonet to say grace.

“Oh,” Flip said airily, “my fairy godmother came and rescued me.”

She knew that they would say them, anyhow, unaware of their wrongness, and that they would think that Paul was handsome and romantic; but as she watched Paul standing there silently she felt with a sudden rush of confidence that he would prefer someone whose words were clumsy and inadequate, but honest, to someone whose words were glib and superficial; and this sudden sureness broke her fear of the silence and she no longer sought frantically for words.

After a while Madame Perceval turned off the road and they plunged into the shade of the forest and now Flip was able to pull aside and walk by herself without feeling conspicuous.

Here the trees were taller and of greater girth than the trees in the woods behind the school, and the sun came through them in delicate arrows, piercing the dark iris of Jackie’s left eye, bringing out the ruddy lights in Madame Perceval’s hair, striking the gold of the braces on Erna’s teeth.

Here the trees were taller and of greater girth than the trees in the woods behind the school, and the sun came through them in delicate arrows, piercing the dark iris of Jackie’s left eye, bringing out the ruddy lights in Madame Perceval’s hair, striking the gold of the braces on Erna’s teeth.

Madame Perceval carried a canteen of coffee and a flask of brandy in case of emergency, and they each had a canteen filled with fresh water from the school.