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then the plunking sound of the chalk as Genevieve dropped it ostentatiously onto the blackboard railing.
    Martha felt herself leaden, bound head and foot, chained as ever was Prometheus, and as gnawed at as was he. Sister Mathilde was looking up into her face as though herself in an ecstasy of pain. “Can you tell that I’m weeping?” the nun asked. Martha shook her head. “I am. The tears are running hot and scalding down my throat. I love that child. I want her for God.”
    Martha could not look at her any longer, and yet the nun’s eyes clung to her own, drawing, sucking back her gaze. Then Mathilde turned to the painting, the green water color, the bare tree bound round with snakes, and lifted a trembling finger which she pointed at the tree. “You understand her allegory, don’t you? You can see the tree is meant to represent me.”
    “No,” Martha said.
    “Oh, yes. I can see it quite plainly.”
    Afterwards Martha could never remember the impulse, or the sound she made; she always thought it must have been a scream, but no one answered it. What she did remember was the impact in each of the five fingers on her right hand as they struck the drawing board, and she recalled the scrape of her fingernails, and the sound of the tearing and crumpling of paper. The nun, she knew, turned away to the window, and Martha, throwing down the destroyed water color to the floor, managed at last to move toward the door, faster then, and then faster, almost away.
    “Martha!”
    She paused on the threshold and looked back.
    “Thank you, my dear,” Mathilde said and bowed her head over her clasped hands, the knuckles of which she pressed against her mouth.
    Martha ran down the back stairs so that she might encounter no one, tore off her smock and escaped outdoors wearing a borrowed coat. She walked to the lake alone although it was forbidden, but even the cold wind sifting snow about her face could not drive out or make orderly the tumult and revulsion. She tried to pray a little, and then to understand. To understand without feeling. She was eighteen and suddenly she remembered an older friend now on the faculty telling her of having been kissed by a priest once when she was eighteen. She had not been able to take Holy Communion for months and months afterwards, compounding her own sins thereby, and unable to account the reason to anyone, or for that matter, to herself. “It just wore off—like most things do,” her friend had answered her query. And remembering it now, Martha was oddly comforted.
    She walked along the crisped sand where the water had come up in a slow eddy and had been caught and transmuted to ice. She thought then of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Maiden and the devil carrying the mirror up to heaven that he might mock the angels. She had never altogether understood the story as a child, but something like that seemed to have just happened to her. Bits of driftwood lay among the dunes, the color of flesh, and shaped by the constant wash of the lake, some pieces, to the delicacy of an elbow or a shoulder or a breast. She took her hand from her glove, for it was cold, and with only the remotest consciousness of an association, warmed it beneath her coat at her own breast.
    She walked to within sight of Dr. Winthrop’s mansion, high on a bluff to the north. He was her father’s friend, not hers. Martha turned back. In the school basement she lingered at the radiator until she was warm, and then went upstairs and knocked at the door of the dean’s office. She asked permission to go home for the rest of the week-end.
    Mother St. John bade her telephone home and if they would expect her, she might go, of course. A wise woman, the nun did not even ask a question. But after Martha had gone, she thought a moment on the girl’s usual Saturday morning activities, and then wrote a note on her calendar pad unmeaningful to anyone except herself. She wrote: “Leonardo da Vinci.”

4
    M ARTHA HAD ATTENDED CONVENT