Miss Sophia spoke with her usual positiveness in that hard, clear-cut voice of hers, raising her white, aquiline profile a trifle against the shadowy background of her ancestral “best room.”
“Why, sister,” pleaded gentle Mrs. Waring, almost tearfully, “I could no more have left my little girl in one of those big, bare, whitewashed barracks … to eat coarse food off thick stoneware in a noisy dining-room … to sleep with fifty other girls in a dormitory where the beds almost touch … she’s not used to anything like that! I tell you, the child is as sensitive as you or I.”
“I must beg of you, Lucy, not to mention my name in any such connection,” interposed her sister. “It would certainly seem that a school expressly provided for just such girls as Yellow Star—or whatever her ridiculous name is—must be the proper place for her. However, you were determined to bring her home with you, and you have had your way. It remains to be seen what will come of it… Let me fill your glass, Emmeline.”
“No, thank you, Sophia,” murmured good Mrs. Brown, hastily finishing her iced tea, and setting the thin, frosted goblet with its bits of shaved lemon peel on the silver tray at her hostess’s elbow. Sophia certainly did have a positive gift for making folks uncomfortable. “I surely do hope,” she plucked up courage to add, “that Yellow Star will do well in Laurel, and be happy with us, now that she is here.”
“We call her Stella,” faltered Mrs. Waring. “It seemed wiser …” (here Miss Sophia indulged in what might in a less aristocratic dame have been plainly called a sniff) … “wiser not to retain anything that might tend to make her needlessly conspicuous—”
“Oh, I see! ‘Stella’—that’s very pretty. I understand you are sending her to grammar school?”
“Stella will enter the eighth grade to-morrow,” Mrs. Waring answered, drawing courage from the delicate sympathy conveyed in her old friend’s soft, purring tones. “She is nearly fourteen, and I want her to be thoroughly prepared for the academy next year.”
“Why, I’m surprised! How ever did you manage it, Lucy? That’s my Doris’s grade—and Doris was fourteen last month.”
“I have taught Stella myself up to now,” her adopted mother announced with modest pride, “and a quicker or more willing pupil I never met with anywhere. Yes, I’ve talked with the superintendent; he questioned her himself; and he says she could get into the academy this fall, he thinks, but advises a year in the grades to give her more confidence and lay a better foundation.”