“Will make me thin, then,” agreed the other. “Let me in, Madge.”
The guard, sucking the pickle convulsively the while, opened the door just a little way. A blanket had been hung on a frame inside in such a manner that scarcely a gleam of lamplight reached the corridor when the door was open.
“Pass the Sweetbriar!” choked Madge, with her mouth full and the tears running down her cheeks. “My goodness, Jennie Stone! these pickles are right out of vitriol!”
“Sour, aren’t they?” chuckled Heavy. “I handed you a real one for fair, that time, didn’t I, Madge?”
Then she tried to sidle through the narrow opening, got stuck, and was urged on by Madge pushing her. With a bang—punctuated by a chorus of muffled exclamations from the girls already assembled—she tore away the frame and the blanket and got through.
“Shut the door, quick, guard!” exclaimed Helen Cameron.
“Of course, that would be Heavy—entering like a female Samson and tearing down the pillars of the temple,” snapped Mercy Curtis, the lame girl, in her sharp way.
“Please repair the damage, Helen,” said Ruth Fielding, who presided at the far end of the room, sitting cross-legged on one of the beds.
The other girls were arranged on the chairs, or upon the floor before her. There was a goodly number of them, and they now included most of the members of the secret society known at Briarwood Hall as the “S. B.’s.”
Ruth herself was a bright, brown-haired girl who, without possessing many pretensions to real beauty of feature, still was quite good to look at and proved particularly charming when one grew to know her well.