hn could not count as a very strong defence, it was true, but he
was fond of her; he showed it in a thousand ways, and although he might
never actually stand up for her, yet he would always be there to comfort
her.

Not that she wanted comfort. From a very early age indeed she
resolutely flung from her all props and sympathies and sentiments. She
hated the house, she hated the loneliness, most of all she hated
grandmother ... but she would go through with it, and no one should know
that she suffered.

II

Then, when she was seventeen, came Munich.

On the day that she first heard that she was to go to Germany to be
"finished" the flashing thought that came to her was that, for a time at
any rate, the "half-hour" would be suspended. Standing there thinking of
the days passing without the shadow of that interview about them was
like emerging from some black and screaming, banging, shouting tunnel
into the clear serenity of a shining landscape. Two years might count
for her escape, and perhaps, on her return, she would be old enough for
her grandmother to have lost her terrors--perhaps....

Meanwhile, that Germany, with its music and forests and toys and
fairies, danced before her. Her two years in it gave her all that she
had expected; it gave her Wagner and Mozart and Beethoven, it gave her
Goethe and Heine, Jean Paul and Heyse, Hauptmann and Moerike, it gave her
a perception of life that admitted physical and spiritual emotions on
precisely the same level, so that a sausage and the _Unfinished
Symphony_ gave you the same ecstatic crawl down your spine and did not,
for an instant, object to sharing that honour.

Munich also gave her the experience and revelations of May Eversley.

There were some twenty or thirty girls who were, with Rachel, under the
finishing care of Frau Bebel, but Rachel held herself apart from them
all. She could not herself have explained why she did so. It was partly
because she felt that she had nothing, whether experience or discovery,
to give to them, partly because they seemed already so happy and
comfortable amongst themselves that they had surely no need of her, and
partly because she feared that from some person or some place, suddenly
round the corner there would spring the terror again. She could even
fancy that her grandmother, watching her, had placed horrors behind
curtains, closed doors, grimed and shuttered windows.--"If you think, my
dear," she might perhaps be saying, "th