For against her will, she fell straightway--in this quiet of the autumn
morning--into a riot of memory, setting her past self against her
present more consciously than she had done yet, recalling scene after
scene and stage after stage with feelings of sarcasm, or amusement, or
disgust, which showed themselves freely as they came and went, in the
fine plastic face turned to the September woods.

She had been at school since she was nine years old--there was the
dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in
her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so
impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a
dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, of a house in London, of a
large and bright nursery, of a smiling mother who took constant notice
of her, of games, little friends, and birthday parties. What had led to
the complete disappearance of this earliest "set," to use a theatrical
phrase, from the scenery of her childhood, Marcella did not yet
adequately know, though she had some theories and many suspicions in
the background of her mind. But at any rate this first image of memory
was succeeded by another precise as the first was vague--the image of a
tall white house, set against a white chalk cliff rising in terraces
behind it and alongside it, where she had spent the years from nine to
fourteen, and where, if she were set down blindfold, now, at twenty-one,
she could have found her way to every room and door and cupboard and
stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.

When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall
for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed
with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and
tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her
nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life