ition. At least she was no longer the self-conscious schoolgirl, paid
for at a lower rate than her companions, stinted in dress, pocket-money,
and education, and fiercely resentful at every turn of some real or
fancied slur; she was no longer even the half-Bohemian student of these
past two years, enjoying herself in London so far as the iron necessity
of keeping her boarding-house expenses down to the lowest possible
figure would allow. She was something altogether different. She was
Marcella Boyce, a "finished" and grown-up young woman of twenty-one, the
only daughter and child of Mr. Boyce of Mellor Park, inheritress of one
of the most ancient names in Midland England, and just entering on a
life which to her own fancy and will, at any rate, promised the highest
possible degree of interest and novelty.

Yet, in the very act of putting her past away from her, she only
succeeded, so it seemed, in inviting it to repossess her.

For against her will, she fell straightway--in this quiet of the autumn
morning--into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her
present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after
scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or
disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the
fine plastic face turned to the September woods.

She had been at school since she was nine years old--there was the
dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in
her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so
impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a
dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a
large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice
of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to
the complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical
phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet
adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in
the background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory
was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague--the image of a
tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces
behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to
fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one,
she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and