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The Reverend Mother had asked if any one had left their bedroom—that was all—and Madeleine had. And to her mind, dulled, and, as is often the case, made stupidly literal by sheer terror, this fact had lost all connection with Jeanne’s and Julie’s escapade, and seemed, by itself, the cause of this mysterious tirade. It certainly was wrong to have left her bedroom—but why did it make her ‘an enemy of the King’?

She found herself seizing on a word here and there in the torrent and spelling it backwards.

‘Example’ ... elpmaxe ... rather a pretty word! la chastité ... étitsahc al ... it sounded like Spanish ... who invented the different languages? Perhaps a prize had once been offered at a College for the invention of the best language, and one student invented French and got the prize, and another nearly got the second, but it was discovered in time that he had only turned his own language backwards, and that was cheating.... Jésus! there was a little bit of wood chipped out of the Reverend Mother’s crucifix! But these thoughts were just a slight trembling on the surface of fathoms of inarticulate terror and despair.