Ordinarily, “Princess Fancyfoot,” as Molly called Maude, was content to lift her sharp nose to a more acute angle when she noticed Beth or to cast a slurring remark or two in her direction. These attentions Beth did not allow to trouble her soul.
She seldom came in direct contact with Maude. To tell the truth, Maude was not a brilliant scholar. Beth and Molly were forging far ahead of the heiress to the Grimshaw millions. Molly had been fired by Beth’s example and wished to become self-supporting, too; and was preparing herself to teach.
“I don’t care what Aunt Cyril says,” Molly announced. “She thinks it beneath a Granger to earn money at any occupation. Aunt Charlotte is more practical. She tells me she will take the money I earn teaching and invest it for me so that it will earn at least seven per cent. Then, she says, I will have something to make me independent in my old age. For, you see, Bethesda, my father spent all his patrimony on the heathen, so I have nothing but what the aunts give me.
“It looks as though Aunt Charlotte had an uncanny belief that I shall remain an old maid like all the other ‘Granger girls,’” and she made a little face at the thought.
With all her hard work at her books and in the “hospital,” Beth went in for at least one relaxation. She played an excellent game at basket-ball, and there was great rivalry at Rivercliff in this athletic pastime.
Beth and Molly had won places on the second basket-ball team and, now that a class had graduated, there was an opening on the first team. This team played championship games against club teams in Jackson City and other first school teams about the State. Basket-ball was a game of which Miss Hammersly herself particularly approved.
The rivalry for the post of honor on the first team waxed high during the first four weeks of the term. The first regular game of the season, with a team from the Jackson City Academy, was to be played on one of the Rivercliff courts.
The chums in Numbers Eighty and Eighty-one, Maude Grimshaw, who could be active if she so chose, Stella Price, and a girl named Pratt, were the contestants for the place of honor on the first team.
Between Beth and Molly it was just a zestful rivalry for first place; the chums were, of course, good natured about it. There was some acerbity between the others, perhaps. In the case of Maude, she naturally fought “tooth and nail,” as Molly said, and was as unpleasant about it as possible.
The physical instructor, Miss Crossleigh, and the other members of the first basket-ball team, decided by vote for the girl who was to make the team. Each candidate who was passed by Miss Crossleigh, was tried out in practice games before the last Saturday in September.