In Damaris, meanwhile, anger gradually gave place to far more complex emotions.  She sat well back in her chair, and clasped her hands firmly in her flowered Pompadour-muslin lap.  Her eyes looked enormous as she kept them fixed gravely and steadily upon the speaker.  For extraordinary ideas and perceptions concerning the said speaker crowded into her young head.  She did not like them at all.  She shrank from dwelling upon or following them put.  They, indeed, made her hot and uncomfortable all over.  Had Theresa Bilson taken leave of her senses, or was she, Damaris, herself in fault—­a harbourer of nasty thoughts?  Consciously she felt to grow older, to grow up.  And she did not like that either; for the grown-up world, to which Theresa acted just now as doorkeeper, struck her as an ugly and vulgar-minded place.  She saw her ex-governess from a new angle—­a more illuminating than agreeable one, at which she no longer figured as pitiful, her little assumptions and sillinesses calling for the chivalrous forbearance of persons more happily placed; but as actively impertinent, an usurper of authority and privileges altogether outside her office and her scope.  She was greedy—­not a pretty word yet a true one, covering both her manner of eating and her speech.  Registering which facts Damaris was sensible of almost physical repulsion, as from something obscurely gross.  Hence it followed that Theresa must, somehow, be stopped, made to see her own present unpleasantness, saved from herself in short—­to which end it became Damaris’ duty to unfurl the flag of revolt.

The young girl arrived at this conclusion in a spirit of rather pathetic seriousness.  It is far from easy, at eighteen, to control tongue and temper to the extent of joining battle with your elders in calm and dignified sort.  To lay about you in a rage is easy enough.  But rage is tiresomely liable to defeat its own object and make you make a fool of yourself.  Any unfurling of the flag would be useless, and worse than useless, unless it heralded victory sure and complete—­Damaris realized this.  So she kept a brave front, although her pulse quickened and she had a bad little empty feeling around her heart.

Fortunately, however, for her side of the campaign, Theresa—­emboldened by recapitulation of her late boastings at the Miss Minetts’ tea-table—­hastened to put a gilded dome to her own indiscretion and offence.  For nothing would do but Damaris must accompany her on this choir treat!  She declared herself really compelled to press the point.  It offered such an excellent opportunity of acquiring archaeological knowledge—­had not the Dean most kindly promised to conduct the party round the Cathedral himself and deliver a short lecture en route?—­and of friendly social intercourse, both of which would be very advantageous to Damaris.  As she was without any engagement for the day clearly neither should be missed.  Of course, everyone understood how unsuitable it would be to ask Sir Charles to patronize