“After all, though, there’s something pretty fine about them. That one in the middle, now; isn’t he sort of solid and hard and grand, like a big, gray boulder—or—or a charging buffalo?”
“I like to look at them every day,” murmured Stella, at last, with a grateful glance. Cynthia always understood; perhaps not just at first, but in time she was sure to understand. “You see, girls, those were real men; strong and just, faithful and truth-speaking. They were men who talked little and did much. We younger Indians who float along like chips on the current need to keep before our eyes the old strength of our race. Those faces seem to me carved, as you say, just like out of solid rock.”
A day or two later, a little knot of academy girls were all trying to talk at once, in excited voices of which only snatches could be heard.
“I shouldn’t think she’d want to push herself in where she isn’t wanted…”
“Nobody’ll speak to her if she does come.”
“Just as if our crowd cared to associate with shop-girls and—”
Apparently it was all an affair of the social club with the mysterious initials, which had held regular meetings since their sophomore year. It was a club that took pleasure in being exclusive, and had little regard for the point of view of the excluded. How foolish it was of them to feel sore or resentful! Rosey Bernstein, undoubtedly a star pupil, was vulgarly witty at the expense of the club and its unimportant secrets and foolish little mysteries.
There had never been any question about Stella’s membership—Stella whom she and two or three others had been inclined to persecute in the early days, but had given it up when they found to their surprise that the word “Indian” was held a title of honor, rather than a term of reproach. In scholarship they were neck and neck; but what won Rosey completely was the Indian girl’s unaffected admiration of the fat Bernstein baby, of whom the whole family was inordinately proud. Babies were Stella’s weak point, anyway.
But we are losing sight of our conversation, which concerned, not Rosey or Mary Maloney, but a little girl who had been obliged to drop out of her class in their Senior year, and go to work in the factory to help support a large family.