“Yes, Ma’am,” Maude would reply, meekly.
But the next morning, to the unfailing delight of all the pupils, this incorrigible young imp would respond seriously and even more blandly with the same timeworn and utterly foolish phrase.
If Maude ever learned another word of French no one ever discovered it. Indeed, Maude was so busy being funny that she had little time for study.
It was Maude, too, who daily stole a pie from the pantry window sill under the front porch. Maude having discovered a hole in the lattice work near the steps, crawled in one day to investigate. She found numerous pies cooling on the broad sill. She ate one hurriedly and it made her ill. One pie, a large pie at that, was plainly too much for one girl. After that she always took a companion under the porch with her and generously divided the stolen pie. Sometimes the companion was Henrietta; sometimes it was Marjory, once it was Bettie—but Bettie’s conscience troubled her and she wouldn’t go again. Unhappily, the only time that one could be sure of capturing a pie was during the morning recess, a matter of only fifteen minutes. As the pies were always red hot at that time it required courage to bolt them. The mince pies were especially trying, for there is nothing much hotter than a hot raisin.
Maude never was discovered; but long afterwards the girls wondered if she hadn’t made some secret arrangement with the cook. She was quite capable of it for Maude was nothing if not resourceful. And the cook was a good natured person.
[CHAPTER VI—GETTING SETTLED]
After the first busy and exciting weeks when everything was new and a little terrifying, the girls settled down to regular work and, at times to a rather dull life, so sometimes very small events loomed quite large to their young eyes. Of course there were letters from home. And there was no more thrilling moment in the day than that in which Sallie Dickinson appeared on the school platform, at the close of the two o’clock session, with the old brown mail bag under her arm.
Sallie’s blouses were old and faded and her skirt had seen better days but little Jane Pool declared that the post-girl always looked just like an angel when she stepped in through the doorway with that dingy bag.
And of course the girls wrote letters, large numbers of them, to the persons on their writing lists. Some of them liked to write letters and wrote very fat ones. Some of them, like Mabel for instance, hated to write letters and wrote very thin ones. One rainy afternoon, the freckled girl, Cora Doyle, regaled her friends with a distressing tale.
“Do you know,” said she, from her perch on Jean’s window sill, “I believe Dr. Rhodes reads our letters before he sends them. Mine are always late getting to my folks and I’ve seen heaps of letters stacked up in his office for days at a time. And one evening I went in to ask for a piece of courtplaster for Ruth Dennis’s thumb and all those Rhodes people were around a table doing something to a lot of mail.”