style="font-size:15px;"> Queenie accepted the presents, wrote tiny notes to Alex and skilfully gave them to her unperceived, and cut Alex to the heart by telling her sometimes that she made it very hard for one to try and be good and keep all the rules and perhaps get one's blue ribbon next term.
These speeches were to Queenie's credit, and made Alex cry and worship her more admiringly than ever, but they did not tend to lower the transparent, doglike devotion with which Alex would gaze at Queenie's bent profile in the chapel, utterly unconscious of the scandal which her manifest idolatry was creating for the severe nun in the carved stall opposite. She was scolded, placed under strict observation, and every obstacle placed in the way of her exchanging any word with Queenie, until she grew to see herself as a martyr to an affection which every fresh prohibition increased almost to frenzy.
One day she was made the victim of a form of rebuke much dreaded by the pensionnaires. A monthly convocation of the school and mistresses, officially known as la réclame du mois, and nicknamed by the children "the Last Judgment," was held in the Grande Salle downstairs, with the Superior making her state entry after the children had been decorously seated in rows at the end of the long room, and all the other nuns who had anything to do with the school had placed themselves gravely and with folded hands against the walls.
They all stood when the Superior came in, followed by the First Mistress, carrying a sheaf of notes and a great book, which each pupil firmly believed to be devoted principally to the record of her own progress through the school.
Then the Superior, with inclined head and low, distinct voice, spoke a few words of prayer, and settled herself in the large chair behind which the nuns clustered in orderly rows.
The children sat down at the signal given, and listened, at first with smiles as the record of the baby class were read aloud and each mite stood up in her place for all the universe to gaze at her, while the analysis of her month's work, mental and moral, sounded with appalling distinctness through the silence.
"Bébée de Lalonde! première en catéchisme, première en géographie … calcul, beaucoup mieux … elle y met beaucoup de bonne volonté!"
"A la bonne heure!"
The Superior is smiling, every one is smiling, Bébée de Lalonde, her brown curls bobbing over her face, is pink with gratification. Her young class-mistress leans forward, the white veil of novice falling over her black habit.
"Ma Mère Supérieure, pour le mois de S. Joseph, elle se corrige de cette vilaine habitude de mordre ses ongles. Elle a fait de vrais efforts…"
"C'est bien. Faites voir… Venez, ma petite."
Up the long room marches Bébée, two freshly washed tiny pink hands thrust out proudly for the Superior's inspection.
"Très bien, très bien. Vous ferez bien attention au pouce droit, n'est pas?"
The Superior is quite grave, however, every one laughs, and then the serious part of the proceedings begins.
The very little ones are not nervous. Most of them are good, even the naughty ones only get a very gentle homily from the Superior. Then their class-mistress claps her hands smartly and they get up and file out of the room, it not being considered politic to let les petites hear the record of that pen of black sheep, les moyennes.
The indictments become more serious. Marie Thérèse, twice impertinent to a mistress, taking no trouble over her lessons, worst of all, taking no trouble to cure that trick of which we have complained so often – sitting with her knees crossed.
"Even in the chapel, Ma Mère Supérieure."
This is very bad! It is unladylike, it is against all rules, it is extremely immodest… And what an example!
Marie Thérèse, says the Superior decisively, can abandon all hope of obtaining the green ribbon of an aspirante enfant de Marie until she has reformed her ways. The mention of a première in literature gains no approving smile from any one and Marie Thérèse sits down in tears.
Gabrielle, Marthe, Sadie – all through the three classes of the moyenne division of the school, with very few stainless reports and two or three disastrous ones.
Then les grandes. The first of these, in the lowest section, is a name to which the reader, a French woman, always takes exception. She finally compresses her lips and renders it as: "Kevinnie!"
Queenie is always cool and unmoved as she stands up, and Alex always looks at her. At this particular séance, the April one, she took her glances more or less surreptitiously, miserably aware that she had not enough self-control to refrain from them and so avoid risking a rebuke later on.
Queenie held no première. She was always last in her form, undistinguished at music, drawing, needlework, anything requiring application or talent alike. But her perfectly serene complacency was more or less justified by the exaggerated applause of her companions at her faultless "conduct" marks and the assurance of her class-mistress, always given readily, that she was "très docile, très appliquée."
Queenie's popularity was independent of anything extraneous to herself.
The Superior leant forward and asked a question in a low voice.
"Non, ma Mère Supérieure, non."
The denial of a possible accusation, of which Alex guessed the purport, was emphatic. She felt glad and relieved, but had no suspicions as to the indictment following on her own name.
"Alexandra Clare," said Mère Alphonsine sonorously, and Alex stood up.
She no longer felt self-conscious over the ordeal, and was indifferent to the habitual litany of complaints as to her unlearnt lessons, disregard of the rule of silence, and frequent bad marks for disorder and unpunctuality. But to the accusations which she knew by heart, and shared with the majority of the moyenne classe, came a quite unexpected addition, hissed out with a sort of dramatic horror by Mère Alphonsine:
"Alex recherche Kevinnie sans cesse, ma Mère Supérieure."
Only those familiar with the code of pensionnaire discipline in Belgium during the years when Alex Clare and her contemporaries were at school, can gauge the full heinousness of the offence, gravest in the conventual decalogue.
Even Alex, although she had been scolded and punished and made the subject of innumerable homilies, some of them pityingly reproachful, and others explanatorily so, on the same question, felt as though she had never before realized the extent of her own perversion.
She stood up, her hands in the regulation position, pushed under the hideous black-stuff pèlerine that fell from her stiff, hard, white collar to the shapeless waistband of her skirt, the whole uniform carefully designed to conceal and obscure the lines of the figure beneath it.
Overwhelmed with uncomprehending misery and acute shame, she heard two or three of the mistresses add each her quota, for the most part regretfully and with an evident sense of duty overcoming reluctance, to the evidence against her.
"She seeks opportunity to place herself next to Queenie at almost every recreation, ma Mère Supérieure."
"I am afraid that even in the chapel she lets this folly get the better of her – one can see how she lets herself go to distractions all the time…"
So the charges went on.
The summing up of Ma Mère
