The girls nodded their heads sympathetically. Rhoda had stood apart from them for some weeks after her arrival but they had forgiven her for her apparent misunderstanding of them. They had long before forgotten that she had been a “poor sport” at the hazing when she first entered Lakeview. Now Rhoda herself brought it back to mind.
“I simply couldn’t understand your way of making me welcome when I came north,” she said in her own soft southern drawl. “I puzzled about it for a long time, sure all the while that you were wrong and I was right!”
Nan caught her eye and smiled. “We were mean, weren’t we?” she admitted.
“Oh, Nan, it wasn’t you,” the loyal Bess interposed. “You tried to make everything easier for Rhoda, but we simply wouldn’t help you. Why, I believe we were jealous,” she ended as though the idea was an entirely new one. “Girls, remember how Rhoda looked the first time we ever saw her?”
They all nodded.
“You were lovely,” she went on speaking directly to Rhoda.
Rhoda blushed slightly at the frank praise, but Bess paid no heed. “You were dressed in the most perfect brown hat and coat I’ve ever seen,” she continued. “I’ll never forget it.”
“Nor will I,” Rhoda ruefully agreed. “I have never in my life felt so strange and so entirely alone. You were all talking among yourselves and having a grand time. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. I was such an outsider! And when Laura Polk addressed me as Rollicking Rhoda from Rustlers’ Roost, the wild Western adventuress that you had heard so much about, I wished that the floor would open wide and swallow me.
“Since it didn’t, I wanted to turn and run, run as fast as I could back to Rose Ranch and the people I knew. Have you ever felt like that?”
“Many, many times,” Grace agreed heartily. “I’ve wanted to run when I flunked in recitations before the whole class. I’ve wanted to go away and hide just dozens of times when things went wrong. I can hardly bear it when Mrs. Cupp tells me before everyone that Dr. Beulah wants to see me.”