Nor was she afraid of what Linda might say about her at the Hall. Nan Sherwood was deeply hurt by the girl’s arrogance and unkindness; but she had too large a fund of good sense to be disturbed, as Bess was, over Linda’s threatened scandal.
“I don’t believe a girl like her really has much influence among other girls—not the right kind of girls, at any rate,” Nan thought. “And Bess and I don’t want to get in with any other kind.”
She was just as eager as she could be, however, to get to Lakeview Hall, and find out what it and the girls were like. Boarding school was an unknown world to Nan. She felt more confidence now in herself, as the train bore her toward the wild Huron shore on which the school stood, than she had when she journeyed up into the Michigan woods with her Uncle Henry, back in mid-winter.
In that past time she was leaving her dear parents and they were leaving her. Each revolution of the car wheels were widening the space between “Momsey” and “Papa Sherwood,” and herself. By this time Nan had grown used to their absence. She missed them keenly—she would do that up to the very moment that they again rejoined her; but the pain of their absence was like that of an old wound.
Meanwhile she was determined, was Nan, to render such a report of her school-life to her parents as would make them proud of her.
Nan was not a particularly brilliant girl in her books. She always stood well in her classes because she was a conscientious and a faithful student. Bess, really, was the quicker and cleverer of the two in their studies.
Nan was very vigorous, and loved play much more heartily than she did her books. Demerits had not often come her way, however, either in grammar school or high school. Mr. Mangel, the Tillbury principal, had felt no hesitancy in viséing Nan’s application blank for entrance to the same grade as Bess Harley at Lakeview Hall. Nan, he knew, would not disappoint Dr. Beulah Prescott.
This school that she was going to, Nan knew, would be very different from the public school she had attended heretofore. In the first place, it was a girls’ world; there would be neither association with, nor competition with, pupils of the other sex.
Nan was not wholly sure that she would like this phase of her new school life. She liked boys and had always associated with them.
Nan could climb, row, skate, swim, and cut her initials in the bark of a tree without cutting her fingers.