A moment later Mammy Riah entered the room, caught sight of the weeper, grabbed up an old muddy shoe of Beverly’s and raining tears into it forthwith raised a genuine darkey wail of woe which very nearly turned Mrs. Ashby’s tears into hysterics.
CHAPTER V
LESLIE MANOR
It was the opening day at Leslie Manor. Late the evening before the last girl had come straggling reluctantly back after a long summer vacation. This morning all was hustle and bustle. At the rear of the building the last trunks were being bumped down from the express wagon which had brought them from the railway station, and under the direction of Wesley Watts Mather, the dusky porter, janitor and general handy man, were being conveyed to the various rooms in which they and their owners would bide for the ensuing eight months, for Leslie Manor did not open its doors to its pupils until October first and closed them the first week in June. This was at the option of Miss Woodhull, the principal, who went abroad each June taking with her several of her pupils for a European tour, to return with her enlightened, edified charges in September. It was a pleasurable as well as a profitable arrangement for the lady who was absolutely free of encumbrance and could do as she chose.
Leslie Manor had once been the home of a widely known southern family whose fortunes had sadly decreased during the war and completely evaporated after it. For several years the place was entirely deserted and neglected, then Miss Woodhull, recently graduated from a New England college, and fairly bristling with degrees, for which she had exchanged the freshness, sweetness and spontaneity of youth and health, was ordered to spend at least a year in the south in the doubtful hope of recovering the youth and health.
Just where to find these valuable assets was the hardest question to answer. Her only relatives were an elderly maiden aunt and an irascible old uncle whose time was too filled with providing the wherewithal to maintain a very elaborate establishment for a very vain wife and three frivolous daughters, to leave any left over in which to think of the welfare of his only sister’s child. Moreover, his wife and daughters could not endure her, and, truth to tell, they had about as much affinity for one another as have oil and water. They might flow side by side forever but never mingle.
The maiden aunt was her father’s sister, an austere dignified old party who resided most exclusively in her ancestral home on Beacon Street, and lived in a rut worn ages deep by tradition, conviction and self-will. Virginia was, so-to-speak, heiress-presumptive. Not that she was likely to be supplanted by the birth of some one having greater claim to her aunt’s fortune. Her possible rivals for the very substantial income which her aunt enjoyed were foundling asylums, a new religious cult just then in its infancy in the hub of the universe, and innumerable “movements” and “reforms.”
She had sent Virginia through college, provided her with a fair allowance, bidden her make something of herself for the sake of her name and then washed her hands of all responsibility. In her own sight she had fulfilled all her duty. When Virginia Woodhull left —— College after attaining degrees galore, but in broken health, and with twenty-eight years checked off upon her life’s calendar, she seemed to have run plump up against a stone wall.