Ivy Compton-Burnett - Dolores

The scene has a meaning which marks it a scene of its day. It is the common room of the teaching staff in a college for women.

The dispenser of the beverage is crossing the room with movements of easy briskness. She is a woman of forty, older at a glance; with a well-cut, dark — skinned face, iron — grey hair whose waving is conquered by its drawing to the knot in the neck, and dark eyes keen under thick, black brows. That is Miss Cliff, the lecturer in English literature.

The companion to whom she is handing a cup — the lecturer in classics, Miss Butler, — and who takes it with a word in a vein of pleasantry, is a small, straight woman, a few years younger; whose parted hair leaves the forehead fully shown, and whose hazel eyes have humour in their rapid glancing.

“I cannot but see it as ungenerous to brew the coffee with such skill,” she is saying; “in purposed contrast to my concoction of last week.”

“A meanly revengeful comment on my general manner of brewing it,” said Miss Cliff. “Well, you may put its success down to my being out of practice. It is the only reason I can think of for it.”

“I remember the last time you made it,” said a genial, guttural voice at the side of Miss Butler — the voice of Miss Dorrington, the lecturer in German, and a strong illustration of the power of moral attractiveness over the physical opposite; which in her case depended on uncouth features, an eruptive skin, and general ungainliness. “It was that week when you kept getting ill, and at the end I had to make it for you.”

“Hoist with your own petard?” said Miss Butler, smiling at Miss Cliff.

“I think it is a great accomplishment to make good coffee,” said Miss Cliff, in a consciously demure tone; “a very seemly, womanly accomplishment. I cannot feel justified in relaxing my efforts to acquire it, if you will all be generous. Cookery, you know, is the greatest attainment for a woman.”

A short, quaint — looking, middle — aged lady, with a pathetic manner which somehow was comical in its union with her calling of mathematical teacher, looked up with a slow smile. “I fear we are but a boorish set, if that be true,” she said.

“Oh, I know it is true, Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff, meeting Miss Butler’s eyes. “I read it in a book, so of course it was true.”

“Of course,” said Miss Dorrington, in her breathless guttural, no genial quality unsuggested in her face and voice.

“Do any of you remember when you first realised that things in books need not be true?” said Miss Cliff, with the half — philosophising interest in her kind, which was one of her characteristics. “Do you remember feeling the ground you were used to walk upon, slipping from under your feet, and a mist of scepticism rising around you?”

A lady who was standing apart came forward to join in the talk. She was a Frenchwoman, over fifty, with a sallow, clever face, and sad brown eyes which lighted with her smile; who had led a difficult life in the land of her forced adoption, and lived with its daughters, feeling that she owed it no gratitude.

“I imagine most of us had that experience at an early stage for such power of metaphor to be born,” she said.

“I did not mean the metaphors to be quoted from childish reflections,” said Miss Cliff. “I was putting a childish experience into unchildish language. But I remember the experience itself so well. It marks off a chapter in my life for me.”

“Yes; we have so much faith as children,” said the remaining member of the band. “I daresay we could all mark off the chapters in our lives by loss of faith in something. We have to guard against losing faith in too many things.”

The speaker was Miss Adam, the lecturer in history — younger than the others, and young for her youth; with her zeal for the world where she had her life, not untempered by a wistfulness on the world outside, and her faith in the creed of her nurture as untouched by any of the usual shattering forces, as by her special knowledge of its growth.

“It seems we can mark age by steps in scepticism,” said Miss Lemaître. “It would be a help to our curiosity on both, to remember they correspond.”

“It would be a very good way of guessing people’s ages,” said Miss Greenlow, with her inappropriate plaintiveness. “We should simply have to start some disputed topics; and having discovered the doubted points, calculate the chapters marked off.”

“We shall have to warn people to be wary in conversing with Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff.

“She always has told us that all things can be reduced to mathematics, if enough is known about them,” said Miss Butler.

“Well, perhaps we are abusing flippancy,” said Miss Cliff, observing Miss Adam’s silence. “I suppose it is true, after all, that the youngest-natured people are those who keep their beliefs in things; and we should try to keep youthful in nature, I suppose.”

“Youthfulness of nature does not depend upon convictions, surely, speaking seriously,” said Miss Lemaître. “Convictions are a matter of intellect; and our intellects have little to do with our characters.”

“That is a little dogmatic, is it not? “said Miss Butler, who was not very fond of Miss Lemaître. “Our intellects must influence our ways of looking at things and people, and our apprehension of them.”

“Yes, yes; I think they must,” said Miss Cliff; “and our ways of looking at people especially. In our dealings with each other, faith is often another word for charity.”

“Yes, very often,” said Miss Adam; “and charity for faith.”

“That is coming rather near to heresy, I am afraid,” said Miss Lemaître. “Is not the relative value of those qualities settled for us? I am not sure that their interchangeability is doctrinal.”

“No,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head; “it smells badly of schism.”

“Miss Adam meant the word ‘faith’ to be understood in a general, not a particular sense,” said Miss Butler.

“I should not have supposed that any of us meant anything,” said Miss Lemaître.

“It is rather a philosophic subject for so soon after luncheon,” said Miss Dorrington.

“I know that the time of day is said to breed mental inertia,” said Miss Cliff; “but I am constrained to the dubious course of spending it in reading essays. You must excuse my desertion of my post: my pupils have increased. Miss Dorrington, you will succeed me, I am sure?”

“Deplorable irregularity on the part of one in office!” said Miss Butler, as Miss Dorrington changed her position willingly and clumsily.

“The students are increasing very quickly,” said Miss Greenlow. “I don’t know what the opponents of women’s higher education would say to it.”

“I imagine that class has resigned its delusion, that anything can be said for its view,” said Miss Butler, with the casual manner which covers strong feeling; while Miss Cliff, arrested by the subject, paused with her hand on the door.

“Oh no, they cling to it,” said Miss Lemaître, carelessly. “I was listening to two old clergymen talking the other day; and they were agreeing that learning unfitted women for the sphere for which they were fitted by nature and their life through the centuries, with all things included — I believe to the corroboration of Genesis.”

“It is such a quaint argument — that women must not do a thing, because they have not done it before,” said Miss Dorrington, who had yet to take of a subject an other than genial view.

“We are not to try the water till we have learned to swim,” Miss Butler said, in a slightly different spirit.

“Oh, well, they were old,” said Miss Adam. “People can hardly be expected to give up the notions they were bred up in, at the end of their lives.”