believed to account for my lateness and neglected homework, and the
monotonous lessons that held me from my dreams without ever for a
single instant capturing my interest--all these things made me ill
with repulsion. Worst of all was the society of my cheerful,
contented comrades, to avoid which I was compelled to mope in
deserted corridors, the prey of a sorrow that could not be enjoyed, a
hatred that was in no way stimulating. At the best of times the
atmosphere of the place disgusted me. Desks, windows, and floors, and
even the grass in the quadrangle, were greasy with London soot, and
there was nowhere any clean air to breathe or smell. I hated the
gritty asphalt that gave no peace to my feet and cut my knees when my
clumsiness made me fall. I hated the long stone corridors whose
echoes seemed to me to mock my hesitating footsteps when I passed
from one dull class to another. I hated the stuffy malodorous
classrooms, with their whistling gas-jets and noise of inharmonious
life. I would have hated the yellow fogs had they not sometimes
shortened the hours of my bondage. That five hundred boys shared this
horrible environment with me did not abate my sufferings a jot; for
it was clear that they did not find it distasteful, and they
therefore became as unsympathetic for me as the smell and noise and
rotting stones of the school itself.

The masters moved as it were in another world, and, as the classes
were large, they understood me as little as I understood them. They
knew that I was idle and untruthful, and they could not know that I
was as full of nerves as a girl, and that the mere task of getting to
school every morning made me physically sick. They punished me
repeatedly and in vain, for I found every hour I passed within the
walls of the school an overwhelming punishment in itself, and nothing
I made any difference to me. I lied to them because they expected it,