Peggy’s heart leaped. A crimson tide went over her. She shut her eyes before the accusing and indignant gaze of the matron.
So that was what the ladder had been for, and any stupid but she would have known! With dread she looked back along the porch the way she had come and there, sure enough, was a procession of marring footprints in the new grey of the flooring!
She had climbed with great difficulty over the barrier that had been deliberately placed there to prevent such a thing.
And Ditto and the other girls of the house would have to have the porch all done over on account of a silly freshman. For the girls in the invitation houses carried their own expenses, leasing their houses and then conducting them like any tenants.
“I will go ’round the back way, then,” she gasped to the glowering matron. Her one thought was to escape the baneful glare of those eyes.
Her feet stuck firmly when she tried to go and as she was lifting them up with a generous accompaniment of Macefield House paint, the door banged behind her and she was left to make her humiliating way back as she had come, with the ladder to be surmounted again, and her eyes so full of tears of embarrassment that she could hardly see to walk.
She had no intention of going around the back way. Her only desire was to get home.
She must face again the guns of the enemy—for that wonderful poem mustn’t be lost to the Monthly—but she would make her charge after she had rested once more in the trenches of Suite 22, and had equipped her army of one with a new uniform.
For that was the plan that was already taking shape in her mind. She would return in disguise. She had sallied forth in her brightest and best. Well, she would go back as meek as a freshman should, in plain clothes—and who would know she was the young stupid who had scaled the step-ladder and marred the new grey paint of the invitation house?
“Well,” said Katherine, yawning up at her lazily from the couch, when she was once more within the home walls, “how did it go, room-mate?”