Jane was a small girl with a very bright, eager face, smooth brown hair and a great deal of character. Just about everybody liked Jane.
“Are you related to those grand Chicago Pools?” asked Gladys Evelyn one day, as she peeled a fresh stick of gum.
“Mercy, no,” returned Jane, who had listened for a weary half hour to Laura’s tales about her own wonderful people. “There’s nothing grand about us—we’re just plain Pools—little common Pools like mud puddles. No limousines, no diamonds, no ancestors. Just three meals a day and a bed at night. We’re just folks—the commonest kind.”
And Gladys, not noticing the twinkle in Jane’s bright black eye, believed the little rascal, only to learn later that Jane’s father was accounted one of the wealthiest men in the state of Wisconsin. But you never would have known it from Jane.
“I wish,” complained Henrietta, one day, “we hadn’t been two days late in getting to this school. All the girls engaged their walking partners before we came. I like to walk with Victoria—she steps right off like a man—but Gladys Evelyn de Milligan—phew! With all those heels and that tight skirt she can’t walk. But I’ll say one thing for Gladys. She can chew gum.”
“We didn’t mean to leave you out when we four paired off,” assured Jean. “But Marjory asked me and Mabel asked Bettie—why, of course we can switch off sometimes. The old girls engaged their partners last year.”
These walks occurred three times a week. On Sundays, when the entire school walked two by two to church. On Tuesday, when the girls were taken, again in twos, to the village to shop; and on Fridays when they went to the cemetery. The only reason they went to the cemetery was because a walk of a mile and a half straight west ended there.
Sallie Dickinson usually walked with poor old Abbie Smith, the chaperon. Abbie was a forlorn creature, neither old nor young. She had a long red nose, a retreating chin, drooping shoulders and a rounded back. Colorless, straggling hair and pale eyes. A spineless, unpleasant person. Like Sallie Dickinson, she was an orphan. Like Sallie, poor old Abbie had been left penniless at Highland Hall, but at an earlier date. It was said that Abbie’s stepfather had deliberately abandoned her; and, looking at Abbie, it seemed not unlikely. One would have supposed that twenty years of school life would have educated Abbie but they hadn’t. Abbie was incapable of acquiring an education.
“When I look at Abbie,” confided Sallie, one day, as she laid an armful of freshly laundered garments on Jean’s bed, “it makes me just sick. Am I going to be like that twenty years from now?”
“Of course you’re not,” consoled Jean, “You’re ever so bright in school and you—why, Sallie! It’s all in your own hands. If you learn every blessed thing you can, some day you’ll be smart enough to teach. And then, probably, they’d be glad enough to have you teach right here. And if they wouldn’t, you could go some place else. Don’t ever think that you have to stay here and be a stupid, downtrodden servant like poor old Abbie.”