Sylvia wondered what Miss Lee would have thought of Jimmy Monkley and the Pink Pierrots.
The afternoon that the girls arrived at Hornton House Sylvia was sure that nothing could keep her from running away that night; the prospect of facing the chattering, giggling mob that thronged the hitherto quiet hall was overwhelming. From the landing above she leaned over to watch them, unable to imagine what she would talk about to them or what they would talk about to her. It was Miss Lee who saved the situation by inviting Sylvia to meet four of the girls at tea in her room and cleverly choosing, as Sylvia realized afterward, the four leaders of the four chief sets. Who would not adore Miss Lee?
“Oh, Miss Lee, did you notice Gladys and Enid Worstley?” Muriel ejaculated, accentuating some of her words like the notes of an unevenly blown harmonium, and explaining to Sylvia in a sustained tremolo that these twins, whose real name was Worsley, were always called Worstley because it was impossible to decide which was more wicked. “Oh, Miss Lee, they’ve got the most lovely dresses,” she went on, releasing every stop in a diapason of envy. “Simply gorgeously beautiful. I do think it’s a shame to dress them up like that. I do, really.”
Sylvia made a mental note to cultivate this pair not for their dresses, but for their behavior. Muriel was all very well, but those eyebrows eternally arched and those eyes eternally staring out of her head would sooner or later have most irresistibly to be given real cause for amazement.
“Their mother likes them to be prettily dressed,” said Miss Lee.
“Of course she does,” Gwendyr put in, primly. “She was an actress.”
To hell with Gwendyr, thought Sylvia. Why shouldn’t their mother have been an actress?
“Oh, but they’re so conceited!” said Dorothy. “Enid Worsley never can pass a glass, and their frocks are most frightfully short. Don’t you remember when they danced at last breaking-up?”
“This is getting unbearable,” Sylvia thought.
“I think they’re rather dears,” Phyllis drawled. “They’re jolly pretty, anyway.”