Marise had read them with the others, and although neither Father nor Maman paid the slightest attention to what she read, and there were lots of places in Maman's novels ever so much worse than these, she naturally felt an agreeable thrill at the thought of what an explosion there would be if they were ever discovered, reading love-stories at school. It was the fashion with the girls to do it. So she did, and as dramatically as any of the others. But far down, deep under all this, was a hermetically sealed chamber where she kept a secret disgust for the whole subject of falling in love, a secret distaste for men, old or young, and a furiously held determination never to have anything to do with them. It was all very well to carry on against the rules and to play-act with the girls about something in a book, but the faintest approach of the same thing in reality, froze her stiff with indignation and repugnance. When, walking on the street with Jeanne, some well-dressed young man cast a glance of admiration at her, or some half-tipsy workman called out a rough compliment she shrank away from them, hating them and herself; a feeling which old Jeanne zealously fostered. She did not often think about the gray cat now, but she had never forgotten it, and she had picked up a great deal more information than she had had, about what made people like Isabelle snigger and grin, when there was talk of getting a husband. She intensely loathed all that she had seen and learned, whether it were the shocked, nauseated expression on the face of one of the older nuns at school, when she forbade any talk among the girls over the gossip that one of the kitchen-girls had let a young man into the kitchen at midnight; or a passage 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-perche." 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!"