She was miserable, and she had cause to be
miserable. The governesses did not so much
dislike as they contemned her. It was put
about publicly by Mademoiselle Espréménil, as
upon authority from the chief, Marcassin, that
Pauline, or " la petite Anglaise," was poor, and
all but friendless; that she was being
"elevated" almost through charity; and that the
sphere in which she now moved was much
superior to that to which she had been
hitherto accustomed. Lily could not disprove
these malignant inuendoes. She could not but
admit the probability of the schoolmistress
knowing a great deal more about her than she
knew about herself. So she let them have their
way, and suffered in silence. Her schoolmates
were not slow to take up the cue dropped by
their instructresses. None of the big girls
petted her. There were no rich girls in the
school. The elder pupils were mostly in training
to be governesses, and toiled too hard to
find time for petting any one. If wealth
engender laziness, it is not unkindly to the
cultivation of tender-heartedness. A rich old maid
not over pious, is about the pleasantest and
most generous soul alive. 'Tis poverty, griping
galling grinding poverty, that makes spinsters
harsh and sour.

Children are often apt to be pitiless. They
have not felt enough pain themselves to
compassionate its endurance by others, and they are
frequently eager to inflict agony, of the scope and
purport whereof they are ignorant. Lily had scant
mercy shown her. At first her companions took
to pinching her, pulling her hair, treading on her
feet, and administering chiquenaudes, or fillips
with the thumb and finger, on her cheeks. She
bore with these for a time, but at last her temper
and her English spirit got the better of her, and
she bestowed so sounding a slap on the back of
the biggest of her tormentors, that the rest
retreated, like a herd of frightened fawns, to a
remote corner of the playground, crying out that
"la petite Anglaise" was dangerous. French
children are proficient in the minute details of
bodily torture, but they do not understand baculine
arguments of the broader kind. French girls
don't slap, French boys don't fight with one
another, and French children are never beaten by
their instructors. Jean Jacques Rousseau and
the French Revolution definitively banished
stripes and blows from the educational curriculum
of Gaul.

So being somewhat wary respecting overt acts
of violence towards the "petite Anglaise," her
schoolmates shunned her. She was left alone
with her tasks, and her wretchedness, and herself.
But for a natural sweetness of mind and gentleness
of nature with which the poor child had
been gifted by Heaven, she might have grown
up sullen, morose, and selfish. There would have
been a hundred excuses for her learning to hate
her species in general, and school-girls and
governesses in particular. But it was mercifully
decreed otherwise, for Lily was made for love.

She found, indeed, that those among whom her
lot was cast would not, through disdain and
prejudice, love her; but she was saved, through her
own innate suavity of soul, from falling into the
other and perilous extreme of loving herself.
Still, she found it necessary to have something
to love. There were no dogs or cats about the
place to fix her affections upon. Rabbits,
squirrels, white mice, silkworms even—all the
ordinary domestic menagerie of children—were
prohibited in the Pension Marcassin. She was
too old to make friends with spiders, with
the rapid lizards, with the beetles of sheeny
armour. No sparrows ever came into the playground.
Small birds are rare in Paris. So, in
default of something tangible to love she elected
to build up a world of her own, and to people it
with creatures of her own imagination, and to
dwell among them, and love them very dearly.
Her world was totally at war with Mercator's
projection. It was a very puerile Utopia, the
most frivolous of Formosas, a highly babyish New
Atlantis—a silly nonsensical world, if you like;
but she believed firmly in it, and her devotion to
its inhabitants was unbounded. If she were
punished, somebody in the Ideal World came to
comfort her, and to show her a clue to work her
way out of the labyrinth of a tangled task. If
she were unhappy, she was invited to festivals and
pic-nics in the Imaginary Land. There she
danced; there she sang; there she went to the
play; there she romped and skipped; and there,
I am afraid, she often went to the water-side to
dine on beautiful dishes of fish. But there was
no noisy company there; and the strange haughty
lady was not one of her company. Only she and
the tall gentleman sat at the table, and afterwards
went into the balcony to gaze upon the ships,
and the long line of the Essex shore, till the sun
went down, and it was dark, and the lamps
began to glimmer. Silly Lily.

In this great school she was the only captive
thus rigorously confined. The other girls went
out on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons for
long walks. On their return they told her
superciliously about the Elysian Fields and the Wood
of Boulogne, about the Garden of Plants and the
Museum of the Louvre. At Easter they talked
of masked balls to which their brothers went, of
débardeurs and Pierrots, of the mad revelry of
the carnival, of the fat ox promenading the
Boulevards and Hercules leading him, while
carriages full of gaily-attired maskers followed
the bedizened beast. These joys were not for
Lily. She was to be kept under, and in.

Only one thing was wanting to complete her
wretchedness, and that came at last. Madame
seldom spoke to her alone. When she made her
periodical tours of inspection through the class-
rooms, Lily incurred an augmented share of
reproof and bad marks at her hands; but she was
seldom summoned to the presence of the
Marcassin. It happened, however, one afternoon, in
the fifth year of residence, that she was
commanded to repair to Madame's cabinet.