e liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French,
mathematics and history. Once she knew how to read French and
Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of
English literature. Why should one remember the things one read?
Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated
her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history
puzzled her and made her ponder, but the political parts angered
her, and she hated ministers. Only in odd streaks did she get a
poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging from
her studies; one afternoon, reading As You Like It; once when,
with her blood, she heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how
the blood beat in a Roman's body; so that ever after she felt
she knew the Romans by contact. She enjoyed the vagaries of
English Grammar, because it gave her pleasure to detect the live
movements of words and sentences; and mathematics, the very
sight of the letters in Algebra, had a real lure for her.

She felt so much and so confusedly at this time, that her
face got a queer, wondering, half-scared look, as if she were
not sure what might seize upon her at any moment out of the
unknown.

Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion
in her. When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were
folded, minute and complete, the finished flowers of the summer
nine months hence, tiny, folded up, and left there waiting, a
flash of triumph and love went over her.

"I could never die while there was a tree," she said
passionately, sententiously, standing before a great ash in
worship.

It was the people who, somehow, walked as an upright menace
to her. Her life at this time was unformed, palpitating,
essentially shrinking from all touch. She gave something to
other people, but she was never herself, since she had no self.
She was not afraid nor ashamed before trees, and birds, and the
sky. But she shrank violently from people, ashamed she was not
as they were, fixed, emphatic, but a wavering, undefined
sensibility only, without form or being.

Gudrun was at this time a great comfort and shield to her.
The younger girl was a lithe, farouche animal, who
mistrusted all approach, and would have none of the petty
secrecies and jealousies of schoolgirl intimacy. She would have
no truck with the tame cats, nice or not, because she believed
that they were all only untamed cats with a nasty, untrustworthy
habit of tameness.

Thi