And when she entered the room, surely enough Phemie jumped up with a nervous bound from a chair immediately behind the door, and, dropping her muff and umbrella and two or three other small articles, caught her in a tremulous embrace, and at once proceeded to bedew her with tears.
“Oh, Dolly!” she lamented, pathetically; “I have come to say good-by; and, oh! what shall I do without you?”
“Good-by!” said Dolly. “Why, Phemie?”
“Switzerland!” sobbed Phemie. “The—the select seminary at Geneva, Dolly, where th-that professor of m-music with the lumpy face was.”
“Dear me!” Dolly ejaculated. “You don't mean to say you are going there, Phemie?”
“Yes, I do,” answered Euphemia. “Next week, too. And, oh dear, Dolly!” trying to recover her handkerchief, “if it had been anywhere else I could have borne it, but that,” resignedly, “was the reason mamma settled on it. She found out how I loathed the very thought of it, and then she decided immediately. And don't you remember those mournful girls, Dolly, who used to walk out like a funeral procession, and how we used to make fun—at least, how you used to make fun of the lady principal's best bonnet?”
It will be observed by this that Miss Dorothea Crewe's intercourse with her pupils had not been as strictly in accordance with her position as instructress as it had been friendly. She had even gone so far as to set decorum at defiance, by being at once entertaining and jocular, though to her credit it must be said that she had worked hard enough for her modest salary, and had not neglected even the most trivial of her numerous duties.
She began to console poor Euphemia to the best of her ability, but Euphemia refused to be comforted.
“I shall have to take lessons from that lumpy professor, Dolly,” she said. “And you know how I used to hate him when he would make love to you. And that was mamma's fault, too, because she would patronize him and call him 'a worthy person.' He was the only man who admired you I ever knew her to encourage, and she would n't have encouraged him if he had n't been so detestable.”
It was very evident that the eldest Miss Bilberry was in a highly rebellious and desperate state of mind. Dolly's daily visits, educational though they were, had been the brightest gleams of sunlight in her sternly regulated existence. No one had ever dared to joke in the Bilberry mansion but Dolly, and no one but Dolly, had ever made the clan gatherings bearable to Euphemia; and now that Dolly was cut off from them all, and there were to be no more jokes and no more small adventures, life seemed a desert indeed. And then with the calamitous prospect of Switzerland and the lumpy professor before her, Phemie was crushed indeed.