That is what puzzled me. I could hear and feel I was singing, and I thought my three companions in guilt could hear and feel they were singing, too. I couldn’t ask them, because we had been forbidden to talk to each other, on the theory that we were less harmful to the general tone of the school apart than together, and we were too cowardly to break the rule. The worst of it was that once we had been proclaimed black sheep in singing class, our disgrace gradually spread out and discolored all of our school life. In a short while, everything we did seemed to be wrong. I learned very little that term, because I spent most of the time either standing in banishment outside this or that classroom door or marching around to Sister Hildegarde’s office to inform her of some new sin. The three other black sheep were just as badly off. Those three weren’t very close friends of mine. As a matter of fact, Sister Hildegarde’s mysterious accusation was the first bond we had in common. One of the girls, Sally Lynch, a tiny black-haired girl with a fringe across her forehead, was only twelve. The two others, Mary Anne Rorke and Cecilia Delaney, were fifteen. Cecilia was fat, but Mary Anne was very ordinary in appearance. We were all in different classes. It puzzled me then, and it still puzzles me, to know why we were chosen to play this role. It was an unexciting, quiet school. No great crises arose, and no great crimes were committed. It seems to me now that, far from making trouble, we four simply attracted what little trouble there was, and perhaps it all looked the same to the nuns. After having been judged guilty, of course, we began to look very guilty in our efforts to reinstate ourselves, and that didn’t help us at all. Also, I grew quite nervous, partly from importance.