Dr. McCurdy was one of the important members of the faculty. Of course, the girls on that corridor had no real right to the extra room. All they could do was to voice their disappointment—and they did that, one may be sure, with vociferation.
"And just when we had come to be so comfortably fixed here," groaned one, when the housekeeper had departed. "I know I shall dis-like that Mrs. Jaynes extremely."
"We won't speak to her!" cried Helen, in a somewhat vixenish tone.
"Maybe she won't care if we don't," laughed Ruth.
But it was no laughing matter, as they all felt. They made a gloomy party in the pretty sitting-room that last evening of its occupancy as a community resort.
"There's Clara Mayberry in her rocker again on that squeaky board," Rebecca Frayne remarked. "I hope she rocks on that board every evening over this woman's head who has turned us out."
"Let's all hope so," murmured Helen.
Jennie Stone suddenly sat upright in the rocker she was occupying, but continued to glare at the ceiling. A board in the floor of the room above had frequently annoyed them before. Clara Mayberry sometimes forgot and placed her rocker on that particular spot.
"If—if she had to listen to that long," gasped Jennie suddenly, "she would go crazy. She's just that kind of nervous female. I saw her at chapel this morning."
"But even Clara couldn't stand the squeak of that board long," Ruth observed, smiling.