The Ordeal of Maude Joyce
IT happened, very strangely, that none of us saw Miss Joyce, the first morning she came into the class-room, until she had been there almost an hour. I don't know why we didn't. Now, looking down what Mabel Blossom calls the long dim vista of the one year that has passed since then, I remember distinctly that it was always very easy to divert our innocent young minds from our studies, and I remember, too, that when we did take notice, we saw about everything in our line of vision. Why, one morning Sister Perpetua brought a worldly friend of hers into the classroom while we were having a written examination in history, and yet we girls made such intelligent and close observation of what that woman wore that when we wrote lists of it at recess—"just for fun and memory-training," as Mabel Blossom said,—most of us hadn't missed a single thing, except that the vamp of her shoes was straight across instead of curved. Mabel Blossom got that in. Mabel is my chum. Of course I don't mean that we described everything she had on; it was only what we could see. But you understand; and besides, Sister Perpetua says that in writing literature we must always leave something to the imagination of the reader. So I will.
But to return to Miss Joyce. She was only fifteen or so, like the rest of us; but you know how formal one gets in a convent school, even at that tender age. Sister Perpetua introduced her to us later as Miss Joyce, and Miss Joyce she remained to most of the girls for a long time. Mabel Blossom says I'm considered one of the friendliest girls in school, but it was fully two weeks before even I called Maude Joyce by her first name, and I think it must have been a whole month before I got round to " Maudie." She was a very proud, haughty girl, and kept us at a distance. She told me afterwards that this was because she was watching us and making up her mind which of us she cared to have come into the individual circle of her life. She used beautiful language sometimes. She said girls often made mistakes when they went to a new school and took up with the first student that came along, instead of waiting to know them and make a wiser choice; and she said that intimacies once formed were often hard to break. You see how clever she was to think of all those things. I never do. I either like a girl or dislike her right off, and when I do like her I just put myself out to show it. Of course I'm particular about some things—the way they do their hair, and clean their teeth, and vital matters like that. I don't like messy girls. But when they have stood those tests, I show them in many subtle ways that I admire them. I send them flowers and notes, and spend all my time with them, and tell them my secrets. Mabel Blossom, who is reading this story as fast as I write it, says I might add here that I tell them my friends' secrets too; but I don't. I can keep a secret as well as any girl I know. The reason I'm telling Maude Joyce's secret in this story is because she said I might. She says that when two human beings have gone together through a great, uplifting, illuminating experience like ours, it should be given to the world.
We will now return to the subject under discussion, as Sister Perpetua always says when we don't know the lesson and try to lead her delicately into other fields of thought. I liked Miss Joyce right away, so at noon, after we had been properly presented, I offered to show her round and tell her anything she wanted to know. Mabel Blossom says I have a taking manner, so I tried to have it with me when I approached Miss Joyce, and she seemed to like me, and talked pleasantly enough, and warmed up quite a little.
