“Do you think she suspects?” Amelia asked Laura as the two walked down the corridor of the dormitory after working their way out of the confusion that followed Nan’s breaking in on their secret meeting.
“She’s pretty smart,” Laura answered. “We’ll never be sure but I think that Rhoda saved the day.”
“The poise that girl has!” Amelia admired. “Every once in a while she does something with such grace and tact that you can just feel the generations of good breeding that are in back of her. She always knows what to say and when to say it. She’s a girl in a million and so utterly unaware of it all too,” she added half wistfully.
Tall, thin, angular Amelia had grown somewhat self-conscious about herself in the days since she first came out of Wauhegan to Lakeview Hall. It had done her good, however. She was developing into a less abrupt, more considerate sort of person than she was when, as a newcomer to Lakeview, she had taken part in the Procession of the Sawneys.
“Yes, she is unaware of it, fortunately,” Laura answered. “She would be an awful snob, if she wasn’t. Now, take Nan. I don’t think she could be a snob no matter what happened to her. She’s true blue all the way through.”
“That’s because she has known what it is to be poor,” Amelia replied. “Her family has often had to fight to get along.”
“Not even money would have made a difference,” Laura maintained. “Not to our Nan. Gee, but she’s swell!”
But how “swell” she was, neither of the girls could really know, even as they couldn’t know what a big surprise the surprise party they themselves were planning was going to be. Even as the arch-conspirators talked and planned the days away, a certain lady that was head of a certain school that you have all heard about in the Nan Sherwood books smiled to herself.
“This school is so full of plots,” Dr. Beulah Prescott said to herself one night as she closed her office before retiring, “That I’m afraid it is positively demoralizing.” But as she said it, her grey eyes twinkled and she looked for a moment as though she liked nothing better than plots and plotters. “Now let’s see,” she paused as she put the keys into her purse, “tomorrow I must see Professor Krenner and get in touch with Grace’s parents again. I don’t see how we are going to manage about Walter.”
At the thought, she shook her head. Then she smiled again to herself. “Problems, problems, problems all the while,” she said as if she relished them all.