head on her
hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief
from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other
children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but
this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion."

Again (Polly is parted from her father): "When the street-door closed,
she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry--'Papa!'

"It was low and long; a sort of 'why hast thou forsaken me?' During an
ensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went
through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as
some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such
instants if she lived."

Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. "I, Lucy Snowe,
was calm," Lucy says when she records that agony. The effect she gives,
of something creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmistakable
in these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye.
"These sudden, dangerous natures--sensitive as they are called--offer
many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured
from participation in their vagaries." When Polly, charming Polly, waits
on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm.
"Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body." When Graham
Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving the
occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had
ever a tolerable stock ready for application."

There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be
heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place
and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and passionate
heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It
is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the
Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in
judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".

The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe,' said she in a
whisper, 'this is a wonderful book ... it tells about distant countries,
a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach without
sailing thousands of miles over the sea.... Here is a picture of
thousands gathered in a desolate place--a plain spread with sand.... And
here are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great
Wall of Chi