Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/170

 in one of Maman's novels, which she had found lying open on the salon table, and read before she could stop herself. Every such experience was like a blow on a bruised spot, deep under the surface of her life, which was so sore now that it ached at the slightest touch, ached and made her sick. She had learned that she must protect it at all costs, and she fought off blindly whatever seemed to threaten it, fought it off with indignation, with brusqueness, with stiffness, with silence, using any weapon she could snatch up. At school, if she found a group of older girls with their heads together, and a certain expression on their faces, the weapon was often simply to run away into another part of the playground. "I can run away faster than they can run after me!" she told herself, fleeing away to where the little girls were playing hop-scotch and "chat-perché."

There were times of course when you couldn't run away literally, but Marise had other methods of running away, the best one being a sudden change of subject—"Oh, Isabelle, your chignon is coming untied!" or "Gabrielle, isn't Sister Ste. Marie coming down the hall?" "Jeanne, you're pulling my hair!"

And she had found, too, that to head people off from beginning on the sort of thing you had to run away from, there was no better device than lively spirits. If you kept joking and laughing and carrying on, the girls didn't have time to lower their voices, look over their shoulders and begin to talk with their faces close to yours.

She was still flushed from laughing and talking and carrying on, when she emerged from the side-stairs into the half empty assembly-room, looking for her wraps, and saw beside Jeanne, Mme. Garnier and her son evidently waiting for Danielle, for Mme. Garnier had Danielle's hat and cloak on her arm. "Oh, zut! What a bore!" She'd have to speak to them; the young man would fidget and make her nervous, and she did think Mme. Garnier the tiresomest of all the frumps who came to call on Maman. She was an old snake-in-the-grass, too,—to use one of Papa's expressions. She pretended to say such sweet things to Maman, and really they were all different ways to