She surveys the room where she has slept all the eighteen years of her life: the old brass bed, the pink armchair in the corner where she has read so many books, the Queen Anne tallboy where she

Fiamma fainted in chapel this morning. The teachers do not know we make ourselves do it, though they suspect we do. They even had a doctor brought in to examine us, but he said there was nothing wrong with us. He said he had never seen such a healthy group of growing girls. We do look healthy.

It is not possible that this respectable doctor, his secretary still in the office, his large desk, his learned volumes, is doing this to me.