“I suppose it is hard luck,” said Bettie, “to be born the kind of person Laura is. I agree with Jean. Let’s forget her and think of pleasant things.”
Laura was a clever girl in many ways. Naturally bright, she learned easily. Naturally rather a forward child, not easily embarrassed, she recited readily—in spite of her gum—and acquired good marks. She broke very few rules. Even that rule that every boarding school girl breaks—the one about remaining in one’s own bed from the time the bell rings for “Lights Out” until it rings again for rising, even that rule was seemingly unbroken by Laura. At any rate, no one ever caught her breaking it. She was rooming now with Victoria Webster in the North Corridor, Victoria having returned thither after the burglar scare was over.
Mrs. Henry Rhodes was matron of the North Corridor, where the Miller girls, Ruth Dennis, Alice Bailey, Hazel Benton, quiet Virginia Mason and some of the older girls roomed. Mrs. Henry, as the girls called her, was easily the most attractive member of the Rhodes family. Quite a young woman, she was both pretty and stylish in a quiet, very pleasing way. Her abundant light brown hair was coiled neatly and becomingly about her small head—she was slender—and not very tall—and Hazel Benton said that she had an aristocratic nose. Most of the girls liked and admired her.
She was not particularly severe or exacting in her duties as matron—Miss Cassandra Woodruff was made of much sterner stuff, as the West Corridor girls knew to their sorrow. Mrs. Henry had once been a boarding school girl herself, likewise a college girl, and her sympathies were with her charges. It was suspected that she didn’t consider it a crime for Dorothy Miller to slip across the hall into Ruth Dennis’s bed to giggle over some joke, or for Hazel Benton to slide into Alice Bailey’s room for a cough drop, or even for half a dozen of the girls to assemble in Dora Burl’s room for a smuggled in, midnight spread of cream puffs; so it is possible that Mrs. Henry didn’t listen, very hard when her charges prowled about at night.
In addition to being a popular matron, she had proved an excellent drawing teacher. Also her needlework classes were turning out good work. She had been married only a short time when her husband died; and, as Cora put it, looked more like a young lady than a widow.
“I wish,” groaned Maude, the day after Miss Woodruff had caught her after “Lights Out” on her way to Cora’s room with a large box of cream puffs under her arm, “that we could swap matrons with the North Corridor. Mrs. Henry knows that cream puffs have to be eaten fresh.”
“Yes,” agreed Cora, “it was certainly a crime about those cream puffs. Four dozen of them at sixty cents, besides what we gave Charles for smuggling them in. Eight of us chipped in with our whole week’s allowance. And what did old Woodsy do but keep them in her warm room all night, and then, after every last one of them had soured beyond hope, she ordered them served for the whole school for lunch.”
[CHAPTER XIV—UNPOPULAR MARJORY]
Twice a week, from half past seven to nine, there was dancing in the dining room. The tables were pushed back and the floor waxed. Sallie Dickinson had to help with that, so, though she loved to dance, she was usually too tired to do it. Miss Julia Rhodes and the three Seniors took turns at the piano. Miss Julia played “The Blue Danube,” and other sentimental waltzes left over from her own rather remote girlhood. The Seniors were much more modern. They played Sousa’s rousing marches with so much vigor that even Mabel, who had never really learned to dance, felt simply compelled to get up and two-step. And when two of the Seniors, at separate pianos, pounded out “The Washington Post,” stout Miss Woodruff, who had been brought up to believe that it was wicked to dance, kept time so vigorously with her feet that (in spite of her hectic nightwear) she always suffered next day from rheumatism in her plump ankles.
Mabel’s sense of rhythm was good and, for a heavy child, she proved surprisingly light on her feet. At the same time she was clumsy and was continually bumping into other dancers or getting in their way and being bumped. Jean and Bettie danced only moderately well. Inexperienced Jean was a trifle stiff as to knees and elbows and Bettie was not stiff enough. Marjory was like a bit of thistledown, here, there and everywhere, so that Jane Pool and little Lillian Thwaite were the only persons sufficiently nimble to keep step with her.