She commenced her convent career characteristically enough by making a sensation.  For on rising in the morning she felt ineffably feeble and forlorn; she seemed to have scarcely closed her eyes, when she must be up and doing.  The tiny hand-basin scarcely held enough water to cool her brow, still giddy from the sea-passage; to do her hair she had to borrow a minute hand-glass from her neighbour, and when after early mass in the chapel she found other prayers postponing breakfast, she fainted most alarmingly and dramatically.  She was restored and refreshed with balm-mint water, but it took some days to reconcile her to the rigid life.  To some aspects of it, indeed, she was never reconciled.  The atmosphere of suspicious supervision was asphyxiating, after the disorderliness and warm humanity of her Irish home, after the run of the stables and the kennels, and the freedom of the village, after the chats with the pedlars and the beggars, and the borrowing and blowing of the postman’s bugle, after the queenship of a host of barefooted gossoons, her loyal messenger-boys.  Now her mere direct glance under reproof was considered “hardi.”  “Droop your eyes, you bold child,” said the shocked Madame Agathe.  A fancy she took to a French girl was checked. “On defend les amities particulieres,” she was told to her astonishment.  But on this one point Eileen was recalcitrant.  She would even walk with her arm in Marcelle’s, and somehow her will prevailed.  Perhaps Eileen was trusted as a foreigner:  perhaps Marcelle, being a day-boarder, weighed less upon the convent’s conscience.  There came a time when even their desks adjoined and were not put asunder.  For by this time Madame La Superieure herself, at the monthly reading of the marks, had often beamed upon Eileen.  The maitresse de classe had permitted her to kiss her crucifix, and the music-mistress was enchanted with her skill upon the piano and her rich contralto voice, such a godsend for the choir.  In her very first term she was allowed to run up to the dormitory for something, unescorted by an Enfant de Marie.  “Ascend, my child,” said Madame Agathe, smiling sweetly, for Eileen had outstripped all her classmates that morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim “Oui, ma mere,” rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness.  She had learned to love this soothing sensation of goodness, as she sat in her blue pelerine on a hard tabouret before her desk, her hands folded in front of her, her little feet demurely crossed.  The sweeping courtesy of entrance and exit dramatised this pleasant sense of virtue.  Later her aspirant’s ribbon painted it in purple.