Nan and Bess looked at each other wonderingly, and then both of them questioningly at Laura.
“Oh, you’ll be glad of my advice—probably this very night. Dr. Beulah doesn’t approve of us girls eating between meals, and the girl that manages to sneak a bite up to her room to eat at bedtime is lucky, indeed,” Laura declared, quite seriously. “I tell you, I have sometimes lain for hours in the throes of starvation because I didn’t have even a cracker.”
“Goodness!” gasped Bess. “I should think you would take up something from the supper table.”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Laura, hollowly. “Wait till you have seen the supper table.”
“What do you mean?” queried Nan, curiously.
“You see all this luxury about you,” proclaimed the red-haired girl, solemnly. “You beheld the magnificence of the main hall as you came in. And it extends to Dr. Beulah’s apartments, which are downstairs here, on the right of the main door.
“But when you turn the other way,” continued Laura, “and approach the chaste and nunnery-like rooms devoted to the uses of ‘us young ladies,’ as Mrs. Cupp calls us, you will at once and immediately be struck, stroke, and stricken with the vast and monstrous difference between our part of the castle and Dr. Beulah’s.
“Oh!” cried this extravagantly speaking girl, “Dr. Beulah has her course dinner at night, carried in by black Susan on a mighty tray. I have often thought that it would be a great lark to catch Susan in the back hall, blindfold her, threaten her with the boathouse ghost if she squealed, and bear off the doctor’s dinner as the spoils of the campaign.”
“But goodness me!” cried Nan, when she could speak for laughter. “Don’t they really give you enough supper?”
“Wait! Only wait!” repeated Laura, warmly. “You’ll soon see. Dr. Beulah believes most thoroughly in ‘the simple life’—for us girls. Oh, she do—believe me! And I think Mrs. Cupp even counts the crackers that go on each dish that is set on the table at supper time.