ZAIDEE
They were the usual lot of girls in a sort of hubbub together. With the exception of the Kirklands they were not taking life seriously as yet. They studied and sang, painted, wrote verses, sometimes were caught on trigonometry and occasionally made awful translations in Latin and French. They changed their ideals, they vowed friendship and fell out with each other, they were spiteful and willful and sweet and penitent, and if “a boy’s will’s the wind’s will,” a young girl’s will in the unformed years is not much better.
Phillipa Rosewald was a sort of leader. A kind of charming girl with many varieties, fascinating, making you like her when she chose and then giving you pin pricks instead of caresses. Before she put on long dresses boys were quarrelling about her and she seemed to sandwich love affairs in with her lessons; she had fine taste in dressing, she could tie a bow, or trim a hat, or furbish up an evening waist in a manner that filled her comrades with envy, and she was a fairly good scholar as well.
But Zaidee with her graciousness and sweet temper won all hearts. Every one was eager to have some little claim upon her. Her mother’s sad accident and her father being one of the survivors of a fierce Indian battle made her a sort of heroine. She was not quite an angel but very human and with the peculiar sweetness that always disarms criticism.
And although it was considered a rather aristocratic school there were the usual feuds and bits of jealousy inseparable from a crowd of girls, the days in the main passed delightfully, and now they were all interested in the rehabilitation of Crawford House, the coming of the young midshipman and the lovely mother who at last had an almost miraculous restoration to health and strength.
Crawford House was full of workmen. Aunt Kate was supervisor. Willard was staying with his parents.
The house stood on a little eminence and had two terraces that were a mass of bloom in the summer. A broad portico ran on two sides and at the end fronting the south there was an imposing tower, many windows. Back of it was a flower garden, a vegetable garden, barns, carriage house and a useful little green-house.
“Dear, I hope the workmen will be through early in December,” said Aunt Kate. “Then there is all the furnishing. Only about six weeks. Does school seem natural, Zay? Have the girls gone way ahead of you?”
“I hardly know yet,” was the laughing reply. “Mrs. Barrington hasn’t really set me at work.”
“Are there many new scholars?”