“Oh yes. They stuffed me when I was young with a lot of nonsense at school. But if the chief end of a girl’s existence is to get married, what good do books do her?”
“Why, that isn’t the chief end of girls of to-day, Mrs. Severn,” laughed Beth. “At least, not of the girls I know.”
“You do not know many of your fellow-students very well, do you?” asked Mrs. Severn, shrewdly. “I know that class of young ladies pretty well. They haven’t, as a rule, a practical idea once in a year. But you are evidently different.”
“I am different in that my people are not well-to-do,” confessed Beth. “I had money enough to get through one year at Rivercliff. I hoped to earn enough to pay for two more years. That is why I began mending for the other girls.”
“And don’t you expect to accomplish your purpose?” asked the interested lady.
“It does not look so now,” said Beth, sadly. “My father has been taken ill. His income has stopped. Had my school fees not been paid until the end of the term I should have gone home at once. But I am earning all I can to take home in June with me and try to repay the folks for some of the money they have spent on me.”
Beth then turned the current of the conversation skilfully and got off the subject of herself and her poverty. Mrs. Severn was really an idle woman who craved amusement. She had little within herself to occupy her mind, and had never learned to occupy her hands.
Beth extracted some enjoyment out of the afternoon, however; but when she went the parrot screamed after her: “I don’t care if you never come back!”
She thought, too, that the foreign maid looked at her with a frown as she watched her through the hall and down the stairs. There were evidently two jealous individuals in the great stone house that did not care to see the mistress of it become interested in a stranger.