The Finishing Touch Read Online Free Page B

seemed not to be in the nature of girls … ‘I fear’, Antonia had sighed, uneasy in mind, ‘that we shall one day find ourselves trapped between the two kinds of irregularity to which girls are prone …’ Uneasiness was not allayed until Antonia, who permitted herself a single maxim in life (‘Go higher’—pun, as it were, on her surname), consulted the Cardinal, who readily allowed that Miss Mount’s girls might confess in the vacations only, when on their parents’ heads be it. Hetty relieved of a chore, Antonia of an anxiety, Antonia found herself quite in charity againwith the Catholic religion (such a sensible institution , the College of Cardinals) though remaining a touch more insistent with the Catholic girls than the others in bidding them, if they should by chance have that capacity, satisfy themselves with the company of their own sex.
    Even the prejudice against precautionary measures, so potentially deleterious to the School among the girls, militated in its favour among the parents. It afforded Antonia a happy sense of continuity to know that so many of her girls, as they grew towards leaving age, had behind them a team of little sisters growing up to take their place, little sisters perhaps even prettier … (younger children so often were …). Invited to stand godmother to the newest Cobos de Porcel girl (who made, really, one too many), Antonia had even proposed a name for the infant: Contracepción: rejected, however, by the Cardinal baptising, Spanish Cardinals (with the exception of Pirelli) being notoriously narrower …
    Even that did not put her out of charity with the Cardinalate, whose sensibleness was all the more to be commended when one compared it to the Synod, the Archimandritehood, the spiritual directors of others among the girls whose rites made of Hetty’s Sunday morning, after its straightforward start, a scramble … a scrambleto deliver the Greeks in time to hear the whole of their interminable, unaccompanied rite and yet to collect the Armenians before some encounter heterodox as their faith overtake them in their mosaic-floored narthex under their jewelled dome … and yet again Hetty must hasten to convey the single Moravian to wherever … Antonia had lately decided to reject, with regret (one liked the exotic), on account of the difficulty of the day, all Jews, Hindus and Moslems unless lapsed …
    (She had accepted an Old Catholic, difficulties though it entailed. ‘She does not seem to me’, Antonia had murmured, ‘so very old …’)
    Surely, by now, even the last Moravian or Melchite must be being garnered in, somewhere, somewhere not far, along the Corniche …
    In the gardens below, it seemed to Antonia, there was a restlessness. Even Fraise du Bois in her trench seemed to stir, into a kind, perhaps, of preconsciousness. The Badessa di Poggibonsi rose, still back-buttoned, from the asparagus fern and, leaving the Plash girls, began to hobble, a stiletto-heeled chèvre, up the terraces. Her breasts, Antonia thought, were vast. She could not be in milk?
    Antonia must soon turn to her own Sunday duty, arrogated to herself, of searching the advice column of Paris-Semaine to make sure none of her girls had written. They would write,of course, anonymously: yet Antonia was confident of discerning them by their plights. Occasionally Antonia’s eye would drop to the advertisements of the agences matrimoniales: ‘ Mr sér., sit.  st., cinq., allure jeune, agr., sport
….
’—the answer, could it be?, for the less finished, for the less finishable girls … even for He—— No. Impossible thought. The School could not be run without her …
    Only, in the gardens, little Miss Outre-Mer, whose name Antonia had lately learnt, shewed none of the restlessness of the others but sat, as she had sat all morning, disconsolate, like a poet seeking the shade, in the moist neighbourhood of the grenouillère … composing, perhaps , a letter to Paris-Semaine.
    She was certainly