But she was reminded of it as she opened her eyes the next morning. It was her fifteenth birthday and to celebrate it, Jeanne had already been out to the market and brought home a great bouquet of white rose-buds. She was loitering around, pretending to pick up the room, but really waiting to hear what Marise would say, so of course Marise must conquer the nausea that white rose-buds gave her and exclaim that they were lovely, and kiss Jeanne and thank her and lean over them and smell them rapturously. What a lot of this sort of thing there was to do, Marise thought, if you didn't want to hurt people's feelings, or let them suspect things you didn't want them to know. Jeanne tried to restrain herself to decorum, but her overwhelming jealousy of any one else who touched Marise's life was too much for her, "They're nicer than that one wilted old thing Gabrielle Meunier gave you, hein?" Marise understood then why Jeanne had chosen white rose-buds. Down below the surface where she kept her real feelings she heard a sick sort of laugh. What she said was, with fervor, "Oh, yes, Jeanne, a thousand times better!" (You might as well make it a thousand times while you were about it.) "Well, I should hope so!" said Jeanne, satisfied at last. That morning when Marise stepped into the courtyard at school a group of older girls had their heads together over a newspaper, and when they saw her, they all started. Elise Fortier rolled the paper up rapidly and put it in her leather portfolio with her school-books. They looked at her very oddly. Four years ago, Marise would have run up to them, demanding, "What's the matter? What makes you look so funny? What is it in the paper?" That was before she became aware of any mire in the world, invisible, wide-spreading, into which almost any casual inquiry seemed likely to plunge you. Marise knew what it was to have some of that indelibly staining mire splashed upon her, from a look, an intonation or a phrase that meaningly expressed much more than it said. She walked with a desperate wariness now, trying to pick her way dry-shod, in the dark. So that morning she was only afraid that the girls _would_ tell her what it was they had found in the paper that made them look so. She pretended that she had seen nothing, ran up to them with a funny story to tell, and went at once to hang up her wraps in the hall outside the class-room door. Sister Ste. Julie passed her and said, "Good-morning, my child." It seemed to Marise that she too looked queerly at her. She reached her hand over her shoulder to make sure her dress was hooked, and felt of the ribbon in her hair. No mirrors were allowed inside the school and convent walls, or she would have stepped to look in one to see what was wrong.