Peter, turning involuntarily in Beulah’s direction, saw the look of chagrin and disappointment on her face, and realized how much she minded playing a losing part in the game and yet how well she was doing it. “She’s only a straight-laced kid after all,” he thought. “She’s put her whole heart and soul into this thing. There’s a look about the top part of her face when it’s softened that’s a little like Ellen’s.” Ellen was his dead fiancée—the girl in the photograph at home in his desk.
“I guess I’ll stay here,” Eleanor said aloud, “all in one place, and study with Mademoiselle.”
It was a decision that, on the whole, she never regretted.
CHAPTER XIII
Brook and River
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“Standing with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet.” |
“I think it’s a good plan to put a quotation like Kipling at the top of the page whenever I write anything in this diary,” Eleanor began in the smart leather bound book with her initials stamped in black on the red cover—the new private diary that had been Peter’s gift to her on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday some months before. “I think it is a very expressive thing to do. The quotation above is one that expresses me, and I think it is beautiful too. Miss Hadley—that’s my English teacher—the girls call her Haddock because she does look rather like a fish—says that it’s undoubtedly one of the most poignant descriptions of adolescent womanhood ever made. I made a note to look up adolescent, but didn’t. Bertha Stephens has my dictionary, and won’t 159 bring it back because the leaves are all stuck together with fudge, and she thinks she ought to buy me a new one. It is very honorable of her to feel that way, but she never will. Good old Stevie, she’s a great borrower.
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“‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’ “Shakespeare. |