y morning Mrs.
Pembrose received thirty-seven applications to take up rooms.

Sec.13

For the next few years it was to be a matter of recurrent
heart-searching for Lady Harman whether she had been profoundly wise or
extremely foolish in tearing up that card of projected rules. At the
time it seemed the most natural and obvious little action imaginable; it
was long before she realized just how symbolical and determining a few
movements of the hand and wrist can be. It fixed her line not so much
for herself as for others. It put her definitely, much more definitely
than her convictions warranted, on the side of freedom against
discipline. For indeed her convictions like most of our convictions kept
along a tortuous watershed between these two. It is only a few rare
extravagant spirits who are wholly for the warp or wholly for the woof
of human affairs.

The girls applauded and loved her. At one stroke she had acquired the
terrible liability of partisans. They made her their champion and
sanction; she was responsible for an endless succession of difficulties
that flowered out of their interpretations of her act. These Hostels
that had seemed passing out of her control, suddenly turned back upon
her and took possession of her.

And they were never simple difficulties. Right and wrong refused to
unravel for her; each side of every issue seemed to be so often in
suicidal competition with its antagonist for the inferior case. If the
forces of order and discipline showed themselves perennially harsh and
narrow, it did not blind her perplexed eyes to the fact that the girls
were frequently extremely naughty. She wished very often, she did so
wish--they wouldn't be. They set out with a kind of eagerness for
conflict.

Their very loyalty to her expressed itself not so much in any sustained
attempt to make the hostels successful as in cheering inconveniently, in
embarrassing declarations of a preference, in an ingenious and
systematic rudeness to anyone suspected of imperfect devotion to her.
The first comers into the Hostels were much more like the swelling
inrush of a tide than, as Mrs. Pembrose would have preferred, like
something laid on through a pipe, and when this lady wanted to go on
with the old rules until Sir Isaac had approved of the new, the new
arrivals went into the cutting-out room and manifested. Lady Harman had
to be telephoned for to allay the manifestation.

And then arose questions of deportment, triv