Miss Grimshaw had given Beth a cold little nod and had gone back into her room.
“What a beautiful kimono that is she wears,” Beth said calmly.
“Maude is the one of whom I told you,” Molly sniffed. “Our ‘glass of fashion and mold of form.’”
“Oh! the dreadfully fashionable girl?”
“Fashion is no name for it!” groaned Molly. “She sports the finest frocks at Rivercliff. She turns all our heads. Oh! she’s a charmer.”
“Why,” said Beth, “I fancy you don’t like her, Molly.”
“Cracky-me!” ejaculated Molly, round-eyed. “How did you come to guess that?”
Beth saw that her friend felt rather keenly on this subject, so she did not probe deeper. She had not seen Miss Grimshaw long enough, herself, to judge the pale girl. But Molly seemed to be such a universal favorite, and so kind and merry with everybody else, that Beth wondered about Maude Grimshaw. As it chanced, Beth was soon to learn just what her neighbor in the blue silk kimono was.
At the present time, however, the girl from Hudsonvale was more interested in the room she was to occupy. There were small girls in the school who roomed together—“a whole raft of primes in each dormitory,” Molly explained—but the older pupils of Rivercliff had each a room of her own and they could live as privately as they could at home. And when she had seen them, Beth thought Numbers Eighty and Eighty-one must be the nicest rooms in the whole school.
“Which they are—about,” Molly said, when Beth expressed this belief. “I expected to have to fight for Eighty-one when I came back this fall. You see, Greba Purcell had your room for four years. She left in June just before graduation. Right away Princess Fancyfoot——”