the remains of the nectarine upon her plate.

"I told them," she repeated, "knowing Sir Charles as well as I do, I felt
I might safely assure them of that."

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 a