Noreen shot a quick glance at Syb. "Where do you come from?"
"Scotland." Joey did not feel inclined to be communicative.
"You're not the scholarship kid, are you, by any chance?" demanded the girl with the bobbed hair.
"Yes."
"Oh, murder! I didn't think you were, somehow."
"Did you think I was going to look so awfully unlike everybody else?" Joey demanded in her turn. She could not quite keep the hurt tone out of her voice, though she tried.
"No; why should we?" the girl with the bobbed hair answered, a shade uncomfortably, and then they all looked at each other and there was an awkward little pause. Noreen broke it, speaking in a more friendly tone than any of them had done yet.
"I suppose you've had someone to put you up to what scholarship girls have to do at Redlands?"
"No." Joey was not expansive, suspecting some covert allusion to that village school, which appeared so upsetting to these very select Redlanders.
"Oh, didn't they?" Noreen's blue eyes met hers gravely, and, Joey fancied, sympathetically.