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best, always will, asymmetrical daisies bordered with little twisted cords. Little twisted cords of the soft thick cotton were tied at Miss Crichton-Walker’s neck, in a constricting little bow that gathered and flounced the work and then hung down in two limp strands, each nearly knotted at its end. Where was Racine, where was the saving thread of reasoned discourse, where the Reader’s dry air? The blinds bellied and swayed slightly. A tapestry of lines of verse like musical notation ran through Emily’s imagination as though on an endless rolling scroll, the orderly repetitious screen of the alexandrine somehow visually mapped by the patterning of Aunt Florrie’s exquisite drawn-thread work, little cornsheaves of threads interspersed by cut openings, tied by minute stitches, a lattice, a trellis.
    C’était pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit.
Ma mère Jézabel devant moi s’est montrée
Comme au jour de sa mort pompeusement parée
 …
    Another bedside vision, highly inappropriate. The thinking Emily smiled in secret, hand under cheek.
    “I think I just want to keep quiet, to concentrate …”
    Miss Crichton-Walker gathered herself, inclining her silver-green coils slightly towards the recumbent girl.
    “I am told that something I said may have upset you. If that is so, I am naturally very sorry. I do not need to tell you that what I said was well-meant, and, I hope, considered, said in the interest of the majority of the girls, I believe, and not intended to give offence to any. You are all equally my concern, with your varying interests and gifts. It may be that I felt the need of others more at that particular time than your need: perhaps I believed that youwere better provided with self-esteem than most. I can assure you that there was no personal application intended. And that I said nothing I do not wholly believe.”
    “No. Of course not.”
    “I should like to know whether you did take exception to what I said.”
    “I don’t want to —”
    “I don’t want to leave you without clearing up this uncomfortable matter. I would hate — I would be very distressed — to think I had caused even unintentional pain to any girl in my charge. Please tell me if you thought I spoke amiss.”
    “Oh no. No, I didn’t. No.”
    How reluctant a judge, poor Emily, how ill-equipped, how hopeless, to the extent of downright lying, of betraying the principles of exactness. The denial felt like a recantation without there having been an affirmation to recant.
    “So now we understand each other. I am very glad. I have brought you some flowers from my little garden: Sister is putting them in water. They should brighten your darkness a little. I hope you will soon feel able to return to the community. I shall keep myself informed of your well-being, naturally.”
    The French papers were written paragraph by slow paragraph. Emily’s pen made dry, black, running little marks on the white paper: Emily’s argument threaded itself, a fine line embellished by bright beads of quotations. She did not make it up; she knew it, and recognized it, and laid it out in its ordered pattern. Between paragraphs Emily saw, in the dark corners of the school hall, under dusty shields of honour, little hallucinatory scenes or tableaux, enacting in doorways and window embrasures a charade of the aimlessness of endeavour. She wrote a careful analysis of the clarity of the exposition of Phèdre’s devious and confused passion and looked up to see creatures gesticulating onthe fringed edge of her consciousness like the blown ghosts trying to pass over the Styx. She saw Miss Crichton-Walker, silvery-muddy, as she had been in the underwater blind-light of the nursery, gravely indicating that failure had its purpose for her. She saw Aunt Florrie, grey and faded and resigned amongst the light thrown off the white linen cloths and immaculate bridal satins of her work, another judge, upright in her chair. She saw Martin, of whom she thought