The blow she awaited fell—twenty-four hours later.
Phœbe spent much of that twenty-four hours in conjectures. And the final and pathetic conclusion to which she came was that she had done something wrong, something “awful bad,” though what it was she could not guess. But whatever it was, it was so terrible that the girls at Miss Simpson’s had turned against her.
And what about Miss Simpson herself? Phœbe understood that Miss Simpson was a personage in the community. Though her school was not the only one of its kind in the place, it was the only one that counted. To be, or not to be, a “Simpson girl” meant, on the one hand, membership in that exclusive very young crowd; on the other, almost complete ostracism from it. Miss Simpson had in her hands (everybody knew it) the social future of the town’s growing girls.
Phœbe’s cry over, Uncle Bob had gone to join his two brothers in the library. A conference began there, Phœbe felt sure; she was certain, too, that she was the subject of it. As she paused at the foot of the stairs—this just outside the library door—she heard Grandma’s voice, too. Grandma was weeping!
Phœbe went up to her room. She stole up, on tiptoe, guiltily. Her brows were puckered, her eyes wide, her lips pursed. She forbore to steady herself by a hand on the banisters, lest they creak.
As she went, she made a resolve. It had to do with Sophie. In a way, of course, Sophie could not be trusted. For though on occasions Sophie seemed to belong on Phœbe’s side—in a dividing of the household which existed only in Phœbe’s mind—at other times the maid swung over to the clique of grown-ups, and Phœbe was left, as it were, on the defence, alone. Yet Phœbe had discovered that now and again it was possible to get information from Sophie. Phœbe’s resolve was to “pump” Sophie.
Arrived in her room, she gave herself up, a second time, to a close scrutiny of herself in the glass. First, she looked at her clothes, feeling that, after all, there was some fault in them (and Uncle Bob, though a Judge, was only a man, after all, and could not competently pass on the matter of a girl’s dress). Having satisfied herself that there was nothing glaringly faulty in her dress, Phœbe took her hand-mirror and went to a window; and seating herself, examined her face, hair and throat—critically, unsparingly.
Once she had asked her mother if she was pretty. And Mother—herself so beautiful!—had answered, with a kiss, “Of course I think so.” But now, Phœbe asked herself, was this quota of hair, features and slender neck considered attractive in the eyes of those who did not love her?
Every freckle and flaw stood out alarmingly in the afternoon light. Phœbe concluded that in point of good looks she brought nothing to Miss Simpson’s School. And as she had no money, like Genevieve Finnegan——
She put down the mirror and went to the closet. In the daytime, she was never afraid to open the door of the closet. That nameless, terrifying Thing which made the place dreaded at night, went higher, after sun-up, so Phœbe believed, to lurk in the cave-like storage places that, sloping of roof, opened off the attic.