She said it in a way I can never forget. It brought back the old feeling Tippy used to give me when she traced my name on my silver christening cup, the feeling that it was up to me to keep it shining. I've thought about it quite a lot since, but I am all mixed up as to which is the best way to do it. Maybe after all it would be more star-like of me to renounce my dream of becoming a famous author, and go in for duty alone, like Miss Crewes.
CHAPTER IX
SEVEN MONTHS LATER
One might think, seeing that I am keeping two diaries now, that I am leading a double life. But such is not the case. When it was decided that I was to go to Washington this year, to the same school that Barby attended when she was my age, she suggested that I keep a journal, as she did while here. She called hers "Chronicles of Harrington Hall." So I am calling mine "The Second Book of Chronicles." Next vacation we are to read them together.
Naturally I want to make mine as interesting as possible, so I've spent considerable time describing life here at school as I see it, and making character sketches of the different girls, teachers, etc. It would have been more satisfactory if I could have put all that in my Memoirs, thus making one continuous story, but it's too great a task to write it all out twice. So I have put a footnote in my Memoirs for the benefit of whoever my biographer may be, saying, "For what happened at Harrington Hall, see my Book of Chronicles."
All during the first term I did not make a single entry in this old blank book, now open before me. It lay out of sight and out of mind in the back of my desk. But this morning I came across it while looking for something, and tonight I have just finished reading it from start to finish. I realize I have left quite a gap in the story by failing to record several things which happened after Esther went home.
As I sit and re-read these last pages, how far away I seem now from that unhappy August afternoon when I came home from the Gilfreds', feeling that I could never take anyone on trust again. It was days before I got over the misery of that experience, and I really believe it was on account of the way I went moping around the house that Barby decided to send me away to school. Father had been urging it for some time, but she wanted to keep me at home with her one more year.