She was very angry with Miss Bowes, with Rona, and with herself for her own folly.
"It's ridiculous to expect me to take up this savage," she argued. "And too bad of Miss Bowes to make out that I'm breaking my word. Oh dear! what am I to write home to Mother? How can I tell her? I believe I'll just send her a picture post card, and only say Rona has come, and no more. Miss Bowes has no right to coerce me. I'll make my own friends. No, I've quite made up my mind she shan't cram Rona down my throat. To have that awful girl eternally in my bedroom—I should die!"
After all her heroics it was a terrible come-down for poor Ulyth now the actual had taken the place of the sentimental. Her class-mates could not forbear teasing her a little. It was too bad of them; but then they had resented her entire pre-appropriation of the new-comer, and, moreover, had one or two old scores from last term to pay off. Ulyth began to detest the very name of "the Prairie Flower". She wondered how she could ever have been so silly.
"I ought to have been warned," she thought, trying to throw the blame on to somebody else. "No one ever suggested she'd be like this. The editor of the magazine really shouldn't have persuaded us to write. It's all his fault in the beginning."
Though the rest of the girls were scarcely impressed with Rona's personality, they were not utterly repelled.
"She's rather pretty," ventured Lizzie Lonsdale. "Her eyes are the bluest I've ever seen."
"And her teeth are so white and even," added Beth Broadway. "She looks jolly when she smiles."
"Perhaps she'll smarten up soon," suggested Addie Knighton. "That blue dress suits her; it just matches her eyes."
To Ulyth's fastidious taste Rona's clothes looked hopelessly ill-cut and colonial, especially as her room-mate put them on anyhow, and seemed to have no regard at all for appearances. A girl who did not mind whether she looked really trim, spruce and smart, must indeed have spent her life in the backwoods.
"Didn't you even have a governess in New Zealand?" she ventured one day. She did not encourage Rona to talk, but for once her curiosity overcame her dislike of the high-pitched voice.