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 China; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine.  There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here—­most strange of all—­is a land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens.  In this land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now.  You don’t know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me.  A mighty goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks.  He believes if I met one in a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a grasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it.’”

It is Polly’s Imagination that appears again in Lucy’s “Creative Impulse”.  “I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes, under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some