“Well, if you could once see Miss Freylinghausen, you’d say she was the speaking image of that person—that maid-servant! I had met Miss Freylinghausen in New York; and now I have seen a good bit of her at Saratoga. She is an odd girl—frank, I should say, and rather blunt in speech—but not at all the sort of girl that one could put this question to: ‘Have you ever been a servant-maid?’ Ha! ha! Ho! ho! and likewise He! he! Fancy asking that of one of the Freylinghausens of Philadelphia!
“Yet, to tell the truth, Beth, that was exactly what I was tempted to ask. Not particularly because Miss Freylinghausen looks so much like that discharged maid I saw at Rivercliff, but because the Philadelphia heiress has taken up what she calls a serious work in life. It’s quite the fad, I believe, nowadays for girls like her to do social work and the like. She has a hobby, and has interested the Mater in it, too. At least, I hear that Miss Freylinghausen is to appear at Hudsonvale some time this coming winter to prance a little on her hobby-horse for the delectation of the Hudsonvale ladies.”
A good deal more there was in the same strain in Larry’s sprightly letter; and it was all interesting to Beth. But this about Miss Freylinghausen and her resemblance to Cynthia Fogg, was what impressed Beth the most; for she chanced to remember now that it was Maude Grimshaw who had first noticed that resemblance between Cynthia and the heiress to the Freylinghausen millions.
Beth had not heard from Cynthia since the year before. That odd girl seemed to have quite dropped out of her life; yet somehow Beth had a feeling that they would meet again. Madam Hammersly had told Beth once that no holiday went by but that she received a card or some little remembrance from Cynthia; but an address was never added to the strange girl’s signature.
As for Maude Grimshaw, she did not appear at Rivercliff at the opening of this fall semester. It was whispered that her marks had been so low the spring previous that she could not have gone on with her class without many conditions, and would have been dropped before Christmas.
So there passed out of Beth’s school life a very unpleasant and annoying influence. Yet, who was to say that Maude Grimshaw’s treatment of the girl from Hudsonvale had not been good discipline for the latter?
CHAPTER XXVII
THE ICE CARNIVAL
Beth entered her senior year in high feather and with her affairs at full sea. She had saved more than enough money to pay for her full year’s tuition. There would be less time during her senior course to devote to the earning of money; but what she could accumulate these coming nine months would go toward the payment of that supposed loan of four hundred dollars that had always been a burden on her mind.
Beth had met Mrs. Euphemia Haven once the preceding summer, and all the time the girl was in Mrs. Haven’s company, her cheeks burned as she thought that she was beholden to Larry’s mother.
“If I ever owe anybody again, or use money borrowed from anybody, no matter who,” Beth told Molly, who was her confidant; “it will be because I am lame in both feet, like Jonathan’s son, because I have as many boils as Job, and am as bald as Elijah must have been.”