"Miss Embry would say you shouldn't use 'awful,'" said Winnie from the depths of the big chair.
"There, you've hit it exactly!" said Miriam. "There is my bugaboo in a nut shell, and it really is an awful one. You know I like to make things sound strong, so I use all the strong-sounding words I can find; and I suppose I do exaggerate. Although I am reproved on all sides, it hasn't the slightest effect on me, except to make me wish that all the people who reprove me, or remind me of someone who does reprove,"—here she made big eyes at Winnie—"were hard of hearing when I am about. No, no; my motto is:
"'Tameness and slowness can't stay with me;
They and I will never agree.'"
"And yet," said Ernestine, "there are a great many very interesting things told in very simple language and without getting away from the white truth."
"Well," said Miriam, "to tell the white truth myself just this once. I don't know whether I want to conquer this or not. I don't believe it is really much relation to the Giant Untruth. I think it's only a little dwarfish imp, a Brownie, who simply 'growed,' like Topsy, and to me is just about as interesting."
"And yet even you couldn't call Topsy beautiful," said Ernestine readily.
"Hardly," laughed Miriam. "But now we've all owned up, let's parade rest, as we say in our broom drills;" and she threw herself back on the sofa, where she sat as if indeed resting from a hard-fought battle.
The five formed a group of American girls good to look upon in their sweet springtime. Ernestine, with serious gray eyes, fair, slender, and tall for her fifteen years, sat erect but graceful in a straight, high-backed chair, her very pose denoting a peaceful courage. Fannie, with skin soft and rosy and eyes of a rare violet hue, occupied a low seat, her arms resting on the sofa against which she was leaning. Miriam, with dark, sparkling eyes and long, thick hair, looking brimful of life in spite of her present lazy attitude, sat just behind Fannie. Next came Winnie, small even for her twelve years, brown-eyed and dainty, looking fond of luxury, as she undoubtedly was and always would be, and yet good and high-minded. Last Gretta herself, a true German, with blue eyes and thick, light braids, a trim and compact little maiden. She sat near a table, her chin in her hand, with its flexible, square-tipped fingers—the fingers of the born and made pianist—for Gretta had "begun," as her mates used to tell, at the age of four.
It was a pleasant room in which they sat; it had many books, German and English and a few in other languages, and where no book-cases rested, the walls were hung with pictures of musicians—Mozart and Bach and Mendelssohn and many others as companions; and on a pedestal stood a bust of Beethoven, whom—so Gretta told the girls as they looked around—her father considered the greatest of them all.