In the boarding school to which her father consigns her for the next half dozen years Marie develops her second passion for the older girl appointed as her “shepherdess.” She remains at school during vacations in order to wander the halls and garden paths she has walked with Geneviève; she violently hates the latter’s fiancé; and for another of Geneviève’s young charges she conceives such jealousy that she attacks and beats her rival and is consequently expelled. The following years from sixteen to nineteen she spends in a progressive school near the Swiss frontier. Its principal, a Parisian, has studied at Lausanne and taught abroad, and her advanced practice is to allow her girls complete freedom outside the classroom. Marie’s delight is carpentry in a shop where she spends all the hours not given to outdoor sports with her English, American and Scandinavian mates. Conscious now of her masculine build and lack of charm, she cultivates cynical indifference to romance, but her instinct rejects the feminism preached by the headmistress and her friends. Marie’s brief visits to her father are boresome, and it is only at his death that she realizes the loss of her one tie on earth. Nostalgia recalls her to Vermont, where she establishes herself as mistress of the house, refuses the attentions of the physician who attended her father, and attempts to become a part of the town’s life. But although the soft femininity of a local aesthete makes a certain appeal, she is impatient of the woman’s affectations, and she has too many traits in common with a dowager philanthropist to make that old aristocrat congenial. Because of her financial contributions to a charity school, however, Marie is at least tolerated, and she puts her carpentry to good use in renovating the school’s quarters unassisted. Claire, the sewing mistress of the new school, a penniless, timorous and fragile young woman of twenty, appeals instantly to Marie’s emotions. Within a matter of weeks they are inseparable. Marie frightens off a tentative suitor of Claire’s in a fashion which sows the seeds of town gossip. When Claire succumbs to pneumonia Marie nurses her through the illness and later takes the girl into her house as companion. As Marie herself has by now refused a second proposal, slander runs rife. The isolation in which the two live is delightful to Marie, but it palls upon Claire so much that when a previous swain returns from his regiment she welcomes him. Marie is seized with a jealousy she cannot conceal. The man taunts her with her reputation, but since she is innocent, even ignorant of its implications, her reaction is merely one of defiance.