“Aunt Cassie is the one in furs and mittens; she’s always cold. I believe she’d get chilblains in July. On the end is Aunt Cyril—you can see she is an aristocrat, the dear! I’m quite proud of my aunties—but nobody ever called them a yard of cats before,” and Molly giggled.
Beth Baldwin’s introduction to Rivercliff School was not all fun and frolic. On Monday came lessons—the beginning of the fall and winter semester. Miss Hammersly and her teachers were quite firm in their intention of making the students of Rivercliff work. And few of them—lazy or otherwise—cared to have a monthly report go home, across which was printed “defective.”
Miss Hammersly’s idea was that girls came to her to study—and for no other reason. This was not a boarding school where the pupils could work or not, as they pleased. “Ours is not an institution for the encouragement of girls lacking in gray-matter,” Miss Hammersly was wont to say. “I am very sorry for the defectives; but three such reports send them home.”
Beth found that the working hours of the school were fully occupied, and that the recreation hours were not long enough for any of the students to get very deeply into mischief.
Even jolly Molly had to repress her super-abundant spirits; or rather, after being under the ministrations of the instructors of Rivercliff School all day, by supper time the most spirited girl in the school was subdued.
“Goodness!” confessed Molly to her chum, coming wearily into Number Eighty and dropping an armful of books on Beth’s study table, “I feel like a wornout dishcloth that’s been drawn sixty times through a knothole! Miss Carroll has just about finished me this time, Beth Baldwin. If I don’t get up to-morrow morning, just write my seven aunties that I died in a good cause—in an attempt to acquire all the knowledge in the world within an infinitesimal length of time.”
“Oh, Molly! it’s not so bad as all that,” Beth said, laughing, though rather ruefully, for she found the system followed at Rivercliff entirely different from that at the Hudsonvale high school. Larry had been right. Three years at this establishment—if she could keep up—would put her a long lap ahead in education.
Her own end of the table was piled high with books, for the two chums studied each evening together—and preferably in Number Eighty. Eighty-one was too apt to be the Mecca of girls who desired to scamp their work and barely get through on the monthly reports “by the skin of their teeth.”
“Which is a perfectly proper expression, and not slang, Beth Baldwin, no matter what Miss Carroll may say,” Molly declared. “Who was it said it—Job or the psalmist?”
“That is your question—you answer it,” replied Beth. “But what do you make out of this awful passage Miss Felice has given us to construe? It’s a heart-breaker, isn’t it?”