Sylvia experienced another giddy reaction of feeling.  Up to that moment, she had felt nothing but shocked and intensely self-centered horror at the disagreeableness of what had happened, and a wild desire to run away to some quiet spot where she would not have to think about it, where it could not make her unhappy, where her heart would stop beating so furiously.  What had she ever done to have such a horrid thing happen in her world!  She had been as much repelled by Judith’s foaming violence as by any other element of the situation.  If she could only get away!  Every sensitive nerve in her, tuned to a graceful and comely order of life, was rasped to anguish by the ugliness of it all.  Up to the moment Camilla came running to her place—­this had been the dominant impulse in the extreme confusion of Sylvia’s mind.

But at the sight of Camilla she felt bursting up through this confusion of mind, and fiercely attacking her instinct of self-preservation, a new force, unsuspected, terribly alive—­sympathy with Camilla—­Camilla, with her dog-like, timid, loving eyes—­Camilla, who had done nothing to deserve unhappiness except to be born—­Camilla, always uneasy with tragic consciousness of the sword over her head, and now smiling brightly with tragic unconsciousness that it was about to fall.  Sylvia’s heart swelled almost unendurably.  She was feeling, for the first time in her life consciously, the two natures under her skin, and this, their first open struggle for the mastery of her, was like a knife in her side.

She sat during the morning session, her eyes on the clock, fearing miserably the moment of dismissal at noon, when she must take some action—­she who only longed to run away from discord and dwell in peace.  Her mind swung, pendulum-like, from one extreme of feeling to another.  Every time that Camilla smiled at her across the heads of the other children, sullenly oblivious of their former favorite, Sylvia turned sick with shame and pity.  But when her eyes rested on the hard, hostile faces which made up her world, the world she had to live in, the world which had been so full of sweet and innocent happiness for her, the world which would now be ranged with her or against her according to her decision at noon, she was overcome by a panic at the very idea of throwing her single self against this many-headed tyrant.  With an unspeakable terror she longed to feel the safe walls of conformity about her.  There was a battle with drawn swords in the heart of the little girl trying blindly to see where the n came in “pneumonia.”

The clock crept on, past eleven, towards twelve.  Sylvia had come to no decision.  She could come to no decision!  She felt herself consciously to be unable to cope with the crisis.  She was too small, too weak, too shrinking, to make herself iron, and resist an overwhelming force.

It was five minutes of twelve.  The order was given to put away books and pencils in the desks.  Sylvia’s hands trembled so that she could hardly close the lid.