bout life--in spite of the most earnest discouragement....
None of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for
life. Most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable passage of blank,
grey occupations through which they had to pass. Beyond was the sunshine.

Ellen gathered what came to her. She realized a certain beauty in music
in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical
enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the
literature master directed her attention to memoirs and through these
she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did
for brief intervals cease to be rigidly dignified and institutional like
Miss Beeton Clavier and became human--like schoolfellows. And one little
spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her class-room
with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much
vagueness and emotion of High Aims, and lent her with an impressive
furtiveness the works of Emerson and Shelley and a pamphlet by Bernard
Shaw. It was a little difficult to understand what these writers were
driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they
reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities
of Miss Beeton Clavier.

In that suppressed and evasive life beneath the outer forms and
procedures of school and home, there came glimmerings of something that
seemed charged with the promise of holding everything together, the key,
religion. She was attracted to religion, much more attracted than she
would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her training
dissuaded her from a free approach. Her mother treated religion with a
reverence that was almost indistinguishable from huffiness. She never
named the deity and she did not like the mention of His name: she threw
a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that Ellen never thoroughly
cast off. She put God among objectionable topics--albeit a sublime one.
Miss Beeton Clavier sustained this remarkable suggestion. When she read
prayers in school she did so with the balanced impartiality of one who
offers no comment. She seemed pained as she read and finished with a
sigh. Whatever she intended to convey, she conveyed that even if the
divinity was not all He should be, if, indeed, He was a person almost
primitive, having neither the restraint nor the self-obliteration of a
refined gentlewoman, no word of it should ever pass her lips. And