Monday, January 5.
Ernie wore her new dress to school this morning. She has been working hard on it ever since Christmas time, and the result is really very creditable.
“The girls will never believe I made it myself, Elizabeth,” she remarked, standing proudly before the mirror while I buttoned her up the back. “It actually fits, and look at these box-pleats! Could anything be more stylish! Don’t you think I’m clever, honey? now, don’t you?”
Indeed, Ernie’s spirits rose to such bubbling point,—what with the openly expressed admiration of the girls, and her own inward conviction of merit,—that she found it impossible to keep them corked up during school hours, and so got into trouble, poor child!
Under the circumstances it is doubly hard. For ever since September, when a “Visiting Board,” as Ernie persists in calling him, was so impressed with the intelligent answers he obtained to his questions in the Sixth Grammar Grade of School No. 47 that he was moved to offer five dollars’ worth of books to be awarded as a prize at the end of the term to the pupil whose general average in attendance, conduct, and scholarship should be highest, her record has been impeccable.
“I simply must come out ahead,” she has declared, over and over again. “It is too good a chance to miss. Five dollars’ worth of books, Elizabeth! Think of it! And if I should get ’em, I’ll choose the kind that will be appropriate to every age and gender, and then I’ll put ’em away, and give them as birthday presents to the family during the year. Isn’t that a scheme?”
So, spurred on by this proud ambition, Ernie has done wonderfully:—even succeeding in subduing her mercurial temperament to such a degree that “there is not a betther gur-rul in all the school than me an’ me hated rival, Lulu Jennings,” as she was moved to confess last Saturday night.
This aforesaid rival is a “creature,” according to Ernie and her chum, Mary Hobart. She has shifty little eyes, a thin, blond pigtail, and “no shape to her legs, at all.” Also, she smells of cheap perfume. Yet these imperfections might be forgiven her, if only she were what the girls call “straight.”
“I’ve seen her myself,” says downright Mary, “with an open Geography hid under a handkerchief in her lap during recitation. She tattles, too, and I believe she’d copy off her own grandmother, if only she got the chance.”
Naturally such sins are not easily forgiven; and there is a decided opinion among the girls that at all hazards Lulu Jennings must be prevented from winning the prize. Feeling runs high on the subject. “She’s smarter than all the rest of us put together in some ways,” they admit. “You can never foresee what trick she is going to play next. But you are clever, too, Ernie, in a way we like better. So keep up the good fight!”