dolphin flirts and the crab leers.
So Alvina spun her medal, and her medal came down tails. Heads or
tails? Heads for generations. Then tails. See the poetic justice.
Now Alvina decided to accept the decision of her fate. Or rather,
being sufficiently a woman, she didn't decide anything. She _was_
her own fate. She went through her training experiences like another
being. She was not herself, said Everybody. When she came home to
Woodhouse at Easter, in her bonnet and cloak, everybody was simply
knocked out. Imagine that this frail, pallid, diffident girl, so
ladylike, was now a rather fat, warm-coloured young woman, strapping
and strong-looking, and with a certain bounce. Imagine her mother's
startled, almost expiring:
"Why, Vina dear!"
Vina laughed. She knew how they were all feeling.
"At least it agrees with your _health_," said her father,
sarcastically, to which Miss Pinnegar answered:
"Well, that's a good deal."
But Miss Frost said nothing the first day. Only the second day, at
breakfast, as Alvina ate rather rapidly and rather well, the
white-haired woman said quietly, with a tinge of cold contempt:
"How changed you are, dear!"
"Am I?" laughed Alvina. "Oh, not really." And she gave the arch look
with her eyes, which made Miss Frost shudder.
Inwardly, Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from questioning.
Alvina was always speaking of the doctors: Doctor Young and Doctor
Headley and Doctor James. She spoke of theatres and music-halls with
these young men, and the jolly good time she had with them. And her
blue-grey eyes seemed to have become harder and greyer, lighter
somehow. In her wistfulness and her tender pathos, Alvina's eyes
would deepen their blue, so beautiful. And now, in her floridity,
they were bright and arch and light-grey. The deep, tender, flowery
blue was gone for ever. They were luminous and crystalline, like the
eyes of a changeling.
Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from question. She wanted, she
_needed_ to ask of her charge: "Alvina, have you betrayed yourself
with any of these young men?" But coldly her heart abstained from
asking--or even from seriously thinking. She left the matter
untouched for the moment. She was already too much shocked.
Certainly Alvina represented the young doctors as very nice, but
rather fast young fellows. "My word, you have to have your wits
about you with them!" Imagine such a speech from a girl tenderly
nurtured: a speech uttered in her own home, and accompanied by a
florid laugh, which would lead a chaste, generous woman like Miss
Frost to imagine--well, she merely abstained from imagining
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