The Rising of Bella Casey Read Online Free Page A

pearly gloves. ‘Sure this will cost a holy fortune!’
    ‘If this is what our Bella needs to get ahead, than that’s what she must have,’ Pappie said with the kind of firmness that put a stop to Mother’s grousing.
    ‘I only hope said pair of gloves will help her find a husband,’she said, adding with a little touch of spite, ‘Miss Swanzy, I see, is on the shelf.’

    On Bella’s first night in the college, Miss Swanzy ordered that baths be drawn.
    ‘I don’t know what this is all in aid of,’ one of the other students said as they stood, two by two, with their towels and soap bars on the corridor.
    ‘Some of these girls,’ she said looking straight at Bella, ‘will never see a bath when they get out.’
    How dare she, Bella thought, cataloguing in her head the appurtenances of home. The running water in the scullery, their own privy and two reception rooms with lace curtains tied with crimson cord, a horsehair sofa, a portrait of the Queen at one side of the mantel and a picture of Lord Nelson on his way to Trafalgar Bay on the other. But this haughty specimen could see no evidence of any of this in Bella; she saw only a scholarship girl, a charity case.
    ‘Excuse me, Miss Collier,’ Mildred Purefoy said before Bella had time to open her mouth. (It was the rule that the students should not use their Christian names with one another. It breeds informality, Miss Swanzy said.) Mildred was a Quaker, tall and beaky, who tried to be a peacemaker. ‘It doesn’t do to make such uncharitable judgements. We are all equal here, and more importantly , we are all equal before Our Maker.’
    ‘Don’t be preaching God to me,’ Prudence Collier snappedback. She was an ugly girl, Bella thought, ugly in nature if not in looks. ‘You, who goes neither to chapel or to church.’
    ‘Let us at least act like ladies, then,’ Mildred pleaded, ignoring the taunt.
    Of all of them, Mildred was the closest to that exalted condition . Her father held a high position in the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and she would go on to be a governess to a double-barrelled family in Kildare.
    ‘Hark at her! Ladies, is it?’ Miss Collier tossed her brassy curls.
    The simmering row might have escalated had Miss Swanzy not intervened ushering Bella into a narrow cubicle. As she filled the bath and disrobed she felt a cloud of disappointment descend, mingling with the steam rising from the claw-footed bath. As a girl without sisters, she had hoped to find amiable companions among her classmates. Instead, on her first night, she had provoked bitter disagreement, without even having her own say in the matter.

    ‘A teacher,’ Miss Swanzy would intone, ‘must be morally above reproach.’
    Not something that troubled Bella Casey for her head was full of books. Carlyle, Molière, Racine, Joyce’s
Handbook of School Management
, the pedagogical teachings of Pestalozzi. She was relieved that her interest did not run to young men. Once or twice, she had been invited by Mabel Bunting or Iris Dagge, to pair off with a friend of their young men, for a foursomewas more respectable than two alone. But since she was only brought along as gooseberry, she had no thoughts of romance for herself in these expeditions. She would often listen to the girls at the College talking, sighing over this fellow or that, wondering if they’d worn a brighter dress or a different pin in their hat whether they’d have been noticed by some swain or other. Romantic speculation would run through the dormitories like a high fever, particularly before College socials to which the male students from Kildare Place were invited.
    These were strictly supervised affairs, with Miss Swanzy on patrol for indiscretions, but even there Bella had never met a young man who was worthy of the kind of fascinations that kept her classmates up all night. She wondered if she was deficient in some way. The Kildare Place students reminded her of nothing more than her brothers and their