“Charity scholars, Maria? Are there such in this rich school?”
“Course. Several, or some. I don’t know how many. I only know there are, account of paying bills for Madame, times.”
“Which are they?”
“Ah! there, Miss Trent! I don’t know, nor nobody, not even the charity ones themselves. Nobody knows except Madame and the folks they belong to. Madame says to have them and to teach them is her great privilege. She’s found the world a place of kindness and she’s been successful; so she just sort of passes it on. A good woman is Madame; and now you’re ready, and here come a lot of the girls to take you with them. Be careful, Miss Trent. Remember you’re but just getting well.”
What a day that followed!
In the big hall, or largest class-room, a temporary platform had been erected and banked with the roses of that sunny June. Behind the roses sat the Faculty. Jessica had not known how large this was nor of how notable presence till she saw this body of gentlemen arrayed in a group before her. In the very place of honor sat Madame, herself richly gowned, and far more imposing in appearance than she had seemed in her ordinary attire.
All her assistants were near her, Miss Montaigne with the rest, smiling a tender welcome to her “special.” There, too, a little apart from the rest, where the roses were heaped highest, their own arms filled with flowers, sat the seniors, the first form girls, who were to be graduated from this school of text-books, this day, and enter upon the larger school of life.
There was music, there was prayer, there was a brief address. But the latter was delivered in the perfunctory way common to such occasions and listened to with an attention equally perfunctory.
It was the row of “sweet girl graduates” themselves that alone claimed and retained the interest of everybody in that crowding audience. Rosalie Thorne was salutatorian, and Helen, valedictorian.
Rosalie acquitted herself well, with her own native modesty and sympathetic manner, and to her, at least, this leave taking of her old associates was a trying ordeal.