Before she reached the school the violence of her emotion had faded, and she was in the first stage of the inevitable physical reaction. She felt weak and shaken. She was going, she knew, to her examination. She wondered idly why she did not feel nervous. She tried to impress the importance of the occasion upon herself, but her thoughts eluded her--sequence had become impossible. She gave up the attempt, and her mind, released, returned to the scene of the morning in incessant, miserable rehearsal.
Mechanically she made her way into the school by the unfamiliar mistresses' entrance, greeted the little knot of competitors assembled in the hall. But if she were introspective and distraught, so were they: her silence was unnoticed.
The nervous minutes passed jerkily. Louise thought that the clock must be enjoying himself. He was playing overseer; he wheezed and grunted as her father did at breakfast; had just such a bland, fat face. Her father would be a fat, horrible old man in another ten years. She was glad. Every one would hate him, then, as she hated him, show it as she dared not do.
Miss Vigers interrupted her meditations; Miss Vigers, utterly unreal in holiday smiles and the first hobble-skirt in which her decent limbs had permitted themselves to be outlined. She marshalled the procession.
The Lower Fifth class-room, newly scrubbed and reeking of naphthaline, with naked shelves and treble range of isolated desks, was unfamiliar, curiously disconcerting. Louise, ever perilously susceptible to outward conditions, was dismayed by the lack of atmosphere. She wriggled uneasily in her desk. It was uncomfortable, far too big for her: Agatha's initials, of an inkiness that had defied the charwoman, stared at her from the lid. She was at the back of the room. Between Marion's neat head and the coiffure of the little Jewess, the bored face of the examiner peered and shifted. He was speaking--
"You will find the questions on your desks. Write your names in the top right-hand corner of each page. Full name. Kindly number the sheets. You are allowed two and a half hours."
A pause. Some rustling of papers and the snap and rattle of pencil-boxes. Then the voice of the examiner again--