"I didn't know she lived like this, either," said Patty, laughing at Rosamond's expressions; "and I don't care whether we can live up to it or not. We'll put on our best frocks and our best manners, and that's all we can do. But, oh girls, I feel like a princess in this room!"
"Then just come and look at mine," cried Elise, who was in the next apartment.
The girls had been given rooms near each other and which, with their anterooms and dressing-rooms, filled up the whole of a large wing of the chateau.
Patty's, as she expressed it to the other girls, looked more like a very large cretonne shirtwaist box than anything else. For the walls and ceiling were covered with a chintz tapestry; the lambrequins, window curtains and door hangings were all of the same material and pattern, and the bed itself was draped and heavily curtained with the same. The bed curtains and window curtains were fastened back with huge rosettes of the chintz, and Patty remarked that it must have been brought by the acre.
The furniture was of the quaintest old French pattern, and so old-fashioned and unusual were the appointments all about, that Patty knew neither the names nor the use of many of them.
"I'd rather sleep in a "cosy-corner" than in that bed," remarked Rosamond; "I know that whole affair will tumble on your head in the night. It's perfectly gorgeous to look at, but seems to me these old things are 'most too old. If I were Ma'amselle I'd root them all out and refurnish."
"You'd be sent home if Ma'amselle heard you talk like that," admonished Patty, "and I'm not a bit afraid of that tent arrangement tumbling down. It's most picturesque, and I shall lie in it, feeling like a retired empress."
"Come, Rosamond," said Elise, "call back those comic opera maids you sent away, and let's get dressed. We mustn't keep Ma'amselle waiting, though I'd ever so much rather perch up here and talk by ourselves. But she's a dear old lady, and we must do our part as well as she does hers."
So Rosamond rang and the maids came back, wondering what strange young demoiselles they had to wait upon now.
Patty allowed herself to be dressed by the deft-fingered maid, and being ready first, stepped out on the little balcony opening from her window to wait for the others.