being spoken to, and expected to take notes like men;
the walks and talks, which even with the interruptions of tennis and
boating were apt to be academically shoppy; the very afternoon tea after
evening chapel had an impressively scholastic flavour utterly foreign to
the desultory proceedings of an ordinary family circle. So had the
further reading by one's self, for one's self, to get up a particular
branch of study; the "swell dinner," as May persisted in calling it in
her own mind, though it was simple and social enough--beyond certain
indispensable forms and ceremonies--to the initiated; the withdrawal
once more to the dreary retirement of her own room, since a new girl had
neither the requisite familiarity nor the heart to go and tap at her
neighbours' doors, where no substitute for "sporting the oak" had as
yet been found, and drop in for a little purely human chatter.

May was so "hard hit," as people say--not with love, but with
home-sickness--that she did not believe she could live to the end of the
summer term. She felt as if she must die of strangeness, fright, and
pining; and that was hard, for they would be very sorry at home, and so
would Annie and Rose in London, though both of them had been able to go
and stay away quite cheerfully like the girls at Thirlwall Hall. Perhaps
May and Dora were not like other girls. There was something wanting or
something in excess about them. Perhaps they were not fit to go through
the world, as she had once heard somebody say of her--May. Perhaps they
were meant to die young--like their Aunt Dolly--and not destined to live
long and struggle helplessly with adverse circumstances. In that case,
Dora was the happy one to be left to spend her short life at home,
though, save for father and mother, she too was all alone, and poor dear
Dora would feel that, and was, perhaps, crying in another empty room as
May was crying in hers at this very moment; but at least, Dora would
pass her last days with father and mother in the old familiar places.

This isolated doom for herself and Dora fascinated May's imagination.
She could not get it out of her head. She dreamt about it, and sat up
in her bed crying and shivering in the silence and solitude of night,
where even by day all was silent and solitary. She began to think
that she would never see Redcross or her mother again. With the
morbid sentimentality of early youth, and its lively capacity for
self-torture, in which to be sure t