“It’s the truth!” snapped the angry girl. “We, who are well-to-do, are exploited for the benefit of these—these paupers that Miss Hammersly allows to come here to Rivercliff. At least, she should have the decency to put them in a department by themselves, and have their sleeping quarters with the servants.”
“Shame! Shame!” cried a dozen voices.
“You go too far, Maude,” declared the “judge.”
“That’s what is the matter with Maude Grimshaw,” ejaculated Molly, boiling over in her wrath, finally. “She wanted Miss Baldwin’s room for one of her ‘Me toos’—and Miss Baldwin wouldn’t make that exchange for money. Nasty thing!”
“Girls! stop this!” ordered the girl in red and black, rising from her seat.
Suddenly Mamie Dunn herself took a hand in the discussion. She stood up and plucked off her red bag. She was a plain, rather unattractive girl who seldom asserted herself; but now she was quite indignant.
“Stop, Maude Grimshaw. You are the meanest girl in Rivercliff School—I don’t care if you are the richest. This is my room and I declare I’ll never invite you into it again.”
She turned swiftly to Beth and put a protecting arm about her. “You are a girl I am proud to have for a friend, Miss Baldwin—I don’t care what others may say. I know I wouldn’t have the pluck to try to work my way through school, providing I could get an education in no other way. I—I hope you’ll forgive me for inviting you here to-night where you have been so insulted and abused by my other guests. I assure you, it was not with my connivance.”
“Oh, I am confident of that, Miss Dunn,” faltered Beth, for Mamie’s kindness touched her more deeply than Maude Grimshaw’s unkind speech. “I thank you, Miss Dunn. I—I can’t stay. I see very clearly now that I should not have come in the first place.”
“Don’t say that!” cried somebody whom Beth thought was Brownie, and who was sobbing, frankly.