“But you don’t think she’s very good, now do you, Miss Kingston?” asked Clara Ellis, a rather lugubrious individual, who had been put on the committee because she was a “prod” in “English lit.,” and not because she had the least bit of executive ability.
Miss Kingston hesitated. “Why no, Clara, I don’t. I’m afraid she won’t work up well; she doesn’t seem to take criticism very kindly. But it’s too soon to judge of that. At present she certainly has a much better conception of the part than any of the others.”
“You don’t think we’ve been too ambitious, do you, Miss Kingston?” asked Barbara, anxiously. Barbara knew Jean well and the prospect of managing the play with her capricious, selfish temperament to be catered to at every turn was not a pleasant one.
“I’ve thought so all along,” put in Clara Ellis, decidedly, before Miss Kingston had had a chance to answer. “I think we ought to have made sure of a good Shylock before we voted to give this play. It will be perfectly awful to make a fizzle of it, and everything depends on getting a good Shylock, doesn’t it, Miss Kingston?”
“A great deal certainly depends on that,” agreed Miss Kingston. “But it’s much too early to decide that you can’t get a good Shylock.”
“Why, who else is there?” demanded Clara, dismally. “Surely every possible and impossible person has tried to-day.”
Nobody seemed ready to answer this argument, and Betty, glancing at the doleful faces of her fellow-workers felt very much depressed until a new idea struck her.
“Miss Kingston,” she said, “there have been fifteen senior plays at Harding, haven’t there? And hasn’t each one been better than any of those that came before it?”
“So each class and its friends have thought,” admitted Miss Kingston, smiling at Betty’s eagerness, “and in the main I think they have been right.”
“Then,” said Betty, looking appealingly at Clara and Barbara, “I guess we can safely go on thinking that our play will be still better. 19— is the biggest class that ever graduated here, and it’s certainly one of the brightest.”