Her dress had lost its starchy lines long since and now resembled a Greek costume as much as anything—at least it would be hard to decide that it wasn’t.
“I never in my life—” murmured one of the girls, and her voice broke the spell and the others began to descend the steep bank, becoming aware of the rest of Peggy’s party as they did so. Peggy herself was still oblivious. The noise of the waterfall obscured all else, and her efforts to breathe in spite of the water that filled her eyes and nostrils and mouth took all her attention.
“That’s the dandiest looking girl I ever saw,” said the tallest of the newcomers, heartily. “I wonder if she could be at Hampton and I not have seen her. If she’s not there she ought to be, and I’m going to try to get her to change her college and come to us.”
“Are you Hampton girls?” Katherine came forward and asked, with the frank and friendly directness that is permissible between girls all of an age and all in school. “Because I’m going to Hampton next year. We are Andrews girls now.”
She thought she noticed a stir among the Hampton people as she said this, and their gaze traveled eagerly over the entire group from the prep school. For these girls would be among the most important entering Hampton next fall—the Andrews girls always coming in for a large share of the freshman honors, carrying off the class offices and writing the class songs and shining in all the more pleasant and social branches of college life. Then the tall girl looked back toward Peggy. Peggy at the same minute saw her audience and came forth, shame-facedly, like a little drowned rat, Katherine said, while she smoothed the pasty wet folds of her skirt and tried to shake some of the water from her curly hair.
“Is she going?” the tall girl demanded with interest, pointing to this dripping apparition.
“I—don’t—think she’s planning to go to college at all,” said Katherine hesitatingly. “I never heard her say that she was going. I’m her room-mate, and she’s the nicest girl in all the world, and Hampton will never know what it loses by not getting her.”
“She’s just the kind we want,” sighed the tall girl. “Well, glad we met you—” Her party started off downstream, but she turned and called back over her shoulder, “When you come up next fall come over and see me,—I’m Ditto Armandale—in Macefield House.”
“Thanks, I’m Katharine Foster,” Peggy’s room-mate called after her. “Good-bye—and I’m really coming.”
With a friendly wave the college girls disappeared around the first bend in the little river, and Katherine turned to the perturbed Peggy, expecting her to make some remark about the ridiculous way the others had found her.