Sensitive, self-contained, old for her years, Sabrina found the detailed supervision of her days wholly fantastic, and considered a good deal of it sheer busybodying on the part of the mistresses. For years at home she had read anything she chose from a large and miscellaneous family library. For years at home it had been assumed that she understood the rudiments of personal hygiene and diet—as for instance, if she ate too many chocolates and then was uncomfortable, it was acknowledged to be her own fault. She was dosed and possibly put to bed, but no one dreamed of confiscating the box. Half the items of the school routine were to her indignities, and most of the others bored her.

Squabbles between sisters, gigglings over boy-friends, half-baked harangues about marriage and careers, passionate cinema crushes—all the normal, cheerful chatter of the dormitory and recreation hours, left her stranded and bewildered, with nothing to contribute. She had no ambition to be a novelist or an actress or an aviatrix or a doctor. She hadn’t a secret love affair. She had nothing to boast of, nothing to conceal, nothing to confide. Most of the girls ignored her after a while, and a few of them actively disliked her for a prig or a dolt.

She could not fit in, she did everything out of turn, she was stricken dumb in the classrooms, and failed miserably at games. Every now and then she cried herself sick and begged to go home. She was the problem-child for all time of that very sane and unimaginative school.

Eventually Aunt Effie came and had a mutually confusing interview with the headmistress, who seemed unable to comprehend that Sabrina was only shy, and used to being by herself, and hated gongs, and public ablutions and prayers, and most of all hated competitive games. Then she took Sabrina away—when a whole new term had just been paid for, too—and there was another governess. But governesses, said Aunt Effie, were not what they had been in her day.

The governess was let go when they came to Nuns Farthing, as it would soon be Easter anyhow, and time for a holiday. They had never lived in the country before, because Father needed to be near the British Museum Reading-Room and the University, but in her youth Aunt Effie had been a fervid gardener, and Sabrina was hoping to own a kitten. She did not want a dog, on account of Aunt Effie’s Bella, a jealous barrel-shaped fox terrier who got older and crosser and fatter each year, and who in Aunt Effie’s eyes could do no wrong.

It was typical of the way Father did things that neither Aunt Effie nor Sabrina had seen the house before they arrived from London prepared to stay in it for an indefinite period of time.