and fulfilled their shining lives, whilst queens and ladies and
princesses upheld the noble order.

She had recognized the Baron Skrebensky as a real person, he
had had some regard for her. But when she did not see him any
more, he faded and became a memory. But as a memory he was
always alive to her.

Anna became a tall, awkward girl. Her eyes were still very
dark and quick, but they had grown careless, they had lost their
watchful, hostile look. Her fierce, spun hair turned brown, it
grew heavier and was tied back. She was sent to a young ladies'
school in Nottingham.

And at this period she was absorbed in becoming a young lady.
She was intelligent enough, but not interested in learning. At
first, she thought all the girls at school very ladylike and
wonderful, and she wanted to be like them. She came to a speedy
disillusion: they galled and maddened her, they were petty and
mean. After the loose, generous atmosphere of her home, where
little things did not count, she was always uneasy in the world,
that would snap and bite at every trifle.

A quick change came over her. She mistrusted herself, she
mistrusted the outer world. She did not want to go on, she did
not want to go out into it, she wanted to go no further.

"What do I care about that lot of girls?" she would
say to her father, contemptuously; "they are nobody."

The trouble was that the girls would not accept Anna at her
measure. They would have her according to themselves or not at
all. So she was confused, seduced, she became as they were for a
time, and then, in revulsion, she hated them furiously.

"Why don't you ask some of your girls here?" her father would
say.

"They're not coming here," she cried.

"And why not?"

"They're bagatelle," she said, using one of her mother's rare
phrases.

"Bagatelles or billiards, it makes no matter, they're nice
young lasses enough."

But Anna was not to be won over. She had a curious shrinking
from commonplace people, and particularly from the young lady of
her day. She would not go into company because of the
ill-at-ease feeling other people brought upon her. And she never
could decide whether it were her fault or theirs. She half
respected these other people, and continuous disillusion
maddened her. She wanted to respect them. Still she thought the
people she did not know were wonderful. Those she knew seemed
always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that
irritated her beyond