The master of St. Benedict's, Vol. 2 (of 2)St. Aubyn, Alan
General
The master of St. Benedict's, Vol. 2 (of 2)
St. Aubyn, Alan
Cambridge (England) -- Fiction; School principals -- Fiction; Students -- Fiction
As Pamela walked up King's Parade in the sweet June sunshine, Wyatt
Edgell passed her on the way from St. Benedict's to the Senate House.
He was swinging along at a great pace, with the bearing of a man who
was assured of an easy victory. His eyes were shining and his lips were
smiling as they had smiled at Lucy. He had no eyes for any other woman;
he passed the Newnham girls without seeing them. His mind was full of
the ideal woman who had promised to meet him in the lane when the exam.
was over.
Maria Stubbs remembered the tower, and flushed scarlet; but Pamela
shivered. She was looking dreadfully pale when Maria left her at the
door. She would have liked to have gone in with her and sat by her side
and held her pens, or picked up the blotting-paper, or collected her
papers; but the examiners were inexorable, and Maria came sadly away.
Pamela pulled off her gloves and glanced over her paper; it was about
as nice a paper as the last day's paper of the Mathematical Tripos
usually is. There were several questions that Pamela had got at her
fingers' ends; they would have puzzled the men, doubtless, but to
a Newnham girl, who had worked for her Tripos as conscientiously
as Pamela had worked, they were a mere bagatelle. She pulled off
her gloves and glanced over her paper, and began work in the quiet,
methodical way in which the students of women's colleges take their
examinations. There was no heat, no excitement, no hurry whatever,
nothing to disturb or bewilder.
She ought to have done uncommonly well with those nicely fitting
questions; but instead of working she sat staring at her paper. The
examiner, walking up and down the room, between the tables, noticed
her abstraction. Once he paused and asked her if she was not feeling
well; and then suddenly it dawned upon her that the time was going on,
and that she had not yet begun. She had never felt it so hard to begin
before; she had never felt that strange reluctance, like a clog upon
her memory, that made the wheels of that fine bit of machinery drag
heavily.
The reluctance--it was nothing more--grew and grew upon her. The
questions were quite easy; she could have answered them with the
smallest effort, but her mind refused to grapple with them.
It was like bringing a horse to the water; the water was cool and
delightful, and it had only to stoop and drink; but it would not
stoop. Pamela could do nothing as she sat there with the time slipping
by but think of the man she had met in King's Parade, and wonder how he
was getting on at the Senate House over the way with the paper that lay
before her. She followed his progress question by question, and when
she had come to the end of the paper she gave a sigh of relief--a big
sigh, for the examiner who was at the other end of the room heard it,
and the girls sitting opposite heard it and looked up.
They saw a very common sight in an examination-room--a girl with a gray
dead face slipping off a chair to the floor. Pamela had fainted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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