"I couldn't ask them all—it wasn't a concert."
"She's very offended, though. I don't think she's going to come to the next social."
"Let her stay at home, then!" snapped Lorraine, thoroughly exasperated.
Dorothy consulted her watch.
"It's frightfully late!" she sighed. "I shan't have time to do my practising. We're going out to a concert to-night."
She sauntered away, having lodged several very unpleasant shafts, and leaving them to rankle.
For Lorraine, all the satisfaction of the afternoon had faded. Nothing hurts so much as the confidences of a so-called friend who tells you the disagreeable things that other people say about you. It is a particularly mean form of sincerity, for the remarks were probably never intended to be repeated. The mischief it often causes is incalculable. Lorraine walked home, feeling that there was a barrier between herself and her cousin.
"I knew Vivien would be annoyed at my being head girl, but I didn't think she'd be so spiteful as that!" she ruminated. "Well, I don't care! I shall go on with the 'socials' all the same, and with any other schemes that crop up. But it is horrid of her, because she might have been such a help to me!"
As the term went on, Lorraine began to see only too clearly that her two great obstacles in the school were Dorothy and Vivien. They did not openly thwart her, but there was a continual undercurrent of opposition, not marked enough for comment, but sufficiently galling. No matter what she proposed, they had always some objection to offer, and, though in the end they might hold up their hands with the rest, it was with an air of concession more than of whole-hearted agreement. They were the cleverest girls in the form, so it was hard to have to count them as opponents, rather than as allies, in her work. The other members of the Sixth, who had passed up the school with her, she knew from experience would give scant help. Patsie was a good-natured rattle-trap, Audrey an amiable little goose; Nellie and Claire were very stodgy, ordinary girls, without an original idea between them, and not much notion of the responsibilities of monitresses.
"I want somebody to back me up, and act as lieutenant," thought Lorraine.