and bees and butterflies. She recalled, with shame, how last summer she had taken lessons in china-painting in Katie Pearl's class, in a vague but futile effort to be something more than she was, and how, after three months, she had suddenly awakened to the fact that she had no talent for the arts. At that very instant the smell of turpentine had begun to nauseate her. And now Lennie Colman understood why she had never called on the Countess Nattatorrini. Several times she had been on the point of making this call; plainly the Countess had wanted her to come; there had been nothing perfunctory in her insistent invitation. Yet she had not gone. Now she understood why; it was because she hated the Countess. She was her rival, her rival with superior advantages.
All the confusion of her thinking, all the mingled feelings of the past four years had suddenly fused during this summer afternoon into an understandable emotion: she was jealous. It had required Gareth's careful casualness in mentioning the Countess, his quiet persistence in begging an introduction, to bring to Lennie some comprehension of the state of her own mind. Four years ago when Gareth had entered the High School she had known him but slightly. Very gradually a kind of sympathetic intimacy had developed between the two. Almost immediately she had become aware that here was an unusual person, the sort of person she had never before encountered in her limited environment. By
