If every tree and every flower
And every star of night
Could join their beauties for an hour
To make one pure delight;
The grace thus formed would cease to be
To nature’s marvel true,
Would lack the mystic unity
For which I worship you.
“I suppose it’s _Songs of Araby_,” said Gillian, humming the lines
through after a second reading, “and you repeat the last two lines. Not
at all bad, but it isn’t really a lyric,” and she slipped the sheet of
paper into her commonplace book and snapped the clasps upon it.
Downstairs in the cloak-room she was confronted by Miss Fairfax.
“Will nothing wake you from your dream?” said she. “I’ve watched you
coming along the gallery and down the stairs, looking as though you’d
been in Heaven.”
“So I have,” said Gillian, “but I believe I’ve been excommunicated all
the same.”
“That’s what I mean. Mrs. Lysaght came rushing by as I came out of the
Extra Matriculation Coaching half an hour ago and said something about
the Bishop and the French tongue. What have you been telling the twins?”
“Only about vowel-sounds,” said Gillian.
“What? Again? And not lucky this time.”
Gillian explained.
“Well, all I can say,” said Miss Fairfax, when the facts were before
her, “is that I wonder, with your genius for missing the real point of a
quotation, all I wonder is that you didn’t administer ‘_Vénus toute
entière à sa proie attachée_’ to the whole class. It’s quite as good in
its way.”
“No, it’s not,” said Gillian, “it’s all t’s and hissing and it’s like
‘our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.’ She
told the school that was the finest line in Wordsworth the other day,
and it’s two lines, and it’s horrid, and she might just as well have
said, ‘though inland far we be’ or ‘old forgotten far-off things’ or ‘I
feel the weight of chance desires.’” And much to Miss Fairfax’s
distress, Gillian sat down on the boot-rack and began to cry.
“If these tears,” said Miss Fairfax, “are shed for the æsthetic
misdirections of our Head, they are wasted; if they bedew the close of
your own career as an instructress of youth they are silly, because,”
Miss Fairfax sat down beside her young colleague and blew her nose with
decision, “because you have not the kind of outlook which fits you for
the career of instructress.”
“Don’t say ‘instructress,’ dear, darling Miss Fairfax,” said Gillian, “I
can’t bear it.”