Why, she had the heaviest head of black
hair that I have ever come across; I used to wonder how she could
bear the weight of it. She was just over twenty-one and at times
she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than
sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the
saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn
with the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a
Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still, steeping
handkerchief after handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one
of her headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of patience who
could be almost miraculously impatient. It was, no doubt, the
convent training that effected that. I remember that one of her
letters to me, when she was about sixteen, ran something like:
"On Corpus Christi"--or it may have been some other saint's day, I
cannot keep these things in my head--"our school played
Roehampton at Hockey. And, seeing that our side was losing,
being three goals to one against us at halftime, we retired into the
chapel and prayed for victory. We won by five goals to three."
And I remember that she seemed to describe afterwards a sort of
saturnalia.
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