She worked hard for her examinations. “Elle est si sage, cet enfant,” she heard Madame Ursule say to Madame Hortense, and she had a delicious sense of overwork.  But she was not always sage.  Once when her school desk was ransacked in her absence—­one of the many forms of espionage—­she refused to rearrange its tumbled contents, and when she was given a bad mark for disorder, she cried defiantly, “It is Madame Rosaline who deserves that bad mark.”  And the pleasure of seeing herself as rebel and phrasemaker was no less keen than the pleasure of goodness.

One other institution found her regularly rebellious, and that was the pious reading which came punctually at half-past eight every morning.  She was bored by all the holy heroines who seemed to have taken vows of celibacy at the age of four.  “Devil take them all,” she thought whimsically one morning.  “But I dare say these good little people have no more reality than our ‘little good people’ who dance reels with the dead on November Eve.  I wish Dan O’Leary had taught them all to shake their feet,” and at the picture of jiggling little saints Eileen nearly gave herself away by a peal of laughter.  For she had learned to conceal her unshared contempt for the holy heroines, and found a compensating pleasure in the sense of amused superiority, and the secret duality which it gave to her consciousness.  She even went so far as to ransack the library for these beatific biographies, and when she found herself rewarded for “diligent reading” her amusement was at its apogee.  And thus, when the first awe and interest of the strange life receded, Eileen was left standing apart as on a little rock, criticising, satirising, and even circulating verses among the few cronies who were not sneaks.  The dowerless “sisters” who scrubbed the floors, the portioned Mesdames, with their more dignified humility, the Refectory readers, the Father Confessors, the little Enfants de Jesus, the big Enfants de Marie, who sometimes owed their blue ribbon to their birth or their money rather than to their exemplary behaviour, all had their humours, and all figured in Eileen’s French couplets.  The difficulty of passing these from hand to hand only made the reading—­and the writing—­the spicier.  Literature did not interfere with lessons, for Eileen composed not during “preparation,” but while she sat embroidering handkerchiefs, as demure as a sleeping kitten.

When the kitten was not thus occupied, she was playing with skeins of logic and getting herself terribly tangled.

She put her difficulties to her favourite nun as they walked in the quaint arcades of the lovely old garden, and their talk was punctuated by the flippant click of croquet-balls in the courtyard beyond.

“Madame Agathe is pleased with me to-day,” said Eileen.  “To-morrow she will be displeased.  But how can I help the colour of my soul any more than the colour of my hair?”