“Cat!” snapped Miss Pritchett, descending the steps in her most stately manner to meet her new friends.
“Cat yourself!” returned the other. “I guess you’ll show your claws, Miss, if you have a chance.”
Perhaps Sairy did not hear all of this; and surely the Bray girls did not. Sairy Pritchett was rather proud of counting these city girls as her particular friends. She welcomed Lydia and Euphemia warmly.
“I hope Lucas didn’t try to tip you into the brook again, Miss Bray,” Sairy giggled to ’Phemie. “Oh, yes! Miss Lydia Bray, Mr. Badger; Mr. Jackson, Miss Bray. And this is Miss Euphemia, Mr. Badger–and Mr. Jackson.
“Now, that’ll do very well, Joe–and Hen. You go ’tend to your own girls; we can git on without you.”
Sairy deliberately led the newcomers into the schoolhouse by the boys’ entrance, thus ignoring the girls who had roused her ire. She introduced Lyddy and ’Phemie right and left to such of the young fellows as were not too bashful.
Sairy suddenly arrived at the conclusion that to pilot the sisters from Hillcrest about would be “good business.” The newcomers attracted the better class of young bachelors at the club meeting and Sairy–heretofore something of a “wall flower” on such occasions–found herself the very centre of the group.
Lyddy and ’Phemie were naturally a little disturbed by the prominent position in which they were placed by Sairy’s manœuvring; but, of course, the sisters had been used to going into society, and Lyddy’s experience at college and her natural sedateness of character enabled her to appear to advantage. As for the younger girl, she was so much amused by Sairy, and the others, that she quite forgot to feel confused.
Indeed, she found that just by looking at most of these young men, and smiling, she could throw them into spasms of self-consciousness. They were almost as bad as Lucas Pritchett, and Lucas was getting to be such a good friend now that ’Phemie couldn’t really enjoy making him feel unhappy.
She was, indeed, particularly nice to him when young Pritchett struggled to her side after the girls were settled in adjoining seats, half-way up the aisle on the “girls’ side” of the schoolroom.