It was happening to me then, as I sat frozen in my seat, staring at the picture of Miss Subways, February 1943, who loves New York and spends her spare time writing to her two officer-brothers in the Army and Navy. The heavy doors of the mind swung on their hinges. I was back in the convent, a pale new girl sitting in the front of the study hall next to a pretty, popular eighth-grader, whom I bored and who resented having me for a deskmate. I see myself perfectly: I am ambitious, I wish to make friends with the most exciting and powerful girls; at the same time, I am naive, without stratagems, for I think that this project of mine will be readily accomplished, that I have only to be myself. The first rebuffs startle me. I look around and see that there is a social pyramid here and that I and my classmates are on the bottom. I study the disposition of stresses and strains and discover that two girls, Elinor Henehan and Mary Heinrichs, are important, and that their approval is essential to my happiness.

     It was to be expected that his parents and sisters should be passionately attached to him, and natural affection and pride were immensely heightened by the circumstance of his extraordinary good looks. In him the Brudenell beauty had come to flower. He was tall, with wide shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, his hair was golden, his eyes flashing sapphire blue, his nose aristocratic, his bearing proud. If there was a fault it was that the lower part of his face was oddly long and narrow so that sometimes one was surprised to catch an obstinate, almost a foxy, look. But the boy had dash and gallantry that were irresistible. He did not know what fear was. A superb and reckless horseman, he risked his neck on the most dangerous brutes. No tree was too tall for him to climb, no tower too high to scale. He excelled in swordsmanship and promised to be a first-class shot. He had in addition to courage another characteristic which impressed itself on all who met him. He was, alas, unusually stupid; in fact, as Greville pronounced later, an ass. The melancholy truth was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it.

     Mr. Edward Chaworth of Medenham was a well-disposed, good-natured man with an adequate fortune, an amiable wife and a numerous family: he thought the world an excellent place, and he could suggest no way in which it could be improved, except for the poachers and the Whigs – they would be abolished in an ideal world, and the trout in his stream would be a trifle larger.