"Maybe she came in a jolly box, after all," Harold said one day to Genevieve; but Genevieve tossed her head.
"Pooh! She wasn't in any box at all, Harold. She's—folks!" And Harold saw that, in spite of the lightness of her words, there were almost tears in Genevieve's eyes.
Presidential duties, too, were easier for Genevieve now. They proved to be, in fact, very far from arduous; and, as Tilly declared, they were, indeed, "dreadfully honorable."
As correspondent for the school magazine Genevieve did not feel herself to be a success. She wrote few items, and sent in even fewer.
Those she did write represented hours of labor, however; for she felt that the weight of nations lay on every word, and she wrote and rewrote the poor little sentences until every vestige of naturalness and of spontaneity were taken out of them. Such information as she could gather seemed always, in her eyes, either too frivolous to be worth notice, or too serious to be of interest. And ever before her frightened eyes loomed the bugbear of PRINT.
It was during the short vacation of three days at Thanksgiving time that Nancy, the second girl at the Kennedys', came to the parlor door one afternoon and interrupted Genevieve's practising.
"Miss Genevieve, I do be hatin' ter tell ye," she began indignantly, "but there's a man at the side door on horseback what is insistin' on seein' of ye; and Mis' Kennedy and Miss Jane ain't home from town yet."
"Why, Nancy, who is the man?"
"I ain't sayin' that I know, Miss, but I do say that he is powerful rough-lookin' to come to the likes o' this house a-claimin' he's Mis' Granger's cousin, as he does."