Presently it came in the homeopathic form of like curing like.
CHAPTER VI
NEW FRIENDS
Naturally, no real work was done on opening day. Miss Woodhull, stately and austere sat in her office directing her staff with the air of an empress. One of the old girls declared that all she lacked was a crown and sceptre, and the new ones who entered that office to be registered, “tagged” the above mentioned girl called it, came out of it feeling at least three inches shorter than when they entered. During her reign in Leslie Manor, Miss Woodhull had grown much stouter and one seeing her upon this opening day would scarcely have recognized in her the slender, hollow-eyed worn-out woman who had opened its doors to the budding girlhood of the land nearly thirty years before. She was now a well-rounded, stately woman who carried herself with an air of owning the state of her adoption, and looked comparatively younger in her fifty-eighth year than she had in her twenty-eighth.
As Beverly sat in her nook watching the little girls of the primary grades run out to their playground at the rear of the building, the old girls of the upper classes pair off and stroll away through the extensive grounds, and the new ones drift thither and yonder like rudderless craft, she saw two girls come from Miss Woodhull’s office. One was a trifle shorter than Beverly and plump as a woodcock. She was not pretty but piquant, with a pair of hazel eyes that crinkled at the corners, a saucy pug nose, a mouth like a Cupid’s bow and a mop of the curliest red-brown hair Beverly had ever seen. Her companion was tall, slight, graceful, distinguished. A little aristocrat from the top of her raven black hair to the tips of her daintily shod feet was Aileen Norman and though only sixteen, she was the one girl in the school who could hold Miss Woodhull within the limits of absolute courtesy under all circumstances. Although descended from New England’s finest stock, Miss Woodhull also possessed her full share of the New Englander’s nervous irritability which all the good breeding and discipline ever brought to bear can never wholly eradicate. Her sarcasm and irony had caused more than one girl’s cheeks to grow crimson and her blood to boil under their stinging injustice, for Miss Woodhull did not invariably get to the root of things. She was a trifle superior to minor details. But Aileen possessed an armor to combat just such a temperament and her companion, Sally Conant’s wits were sharp enough to get out of most of the scrapes into which she led her friend. So the pair were a very fair foil to each other and a match for Miss Woodhull. What their ability would prove augmented by Beverly’s characteristics we will learn later.
As they came down the steps from Miss Woodhull’s office, said office, by-the-by, being in the wing in which the recitation rooms were situated and quite separate from the main building, Sally’s eyes were snapping, and her head wagging ominously; Aileen’s cheeks were even a deeper tint than they ordinarily were, and her head was held a little higher. Evidently something of a disturbing nature had taken place. They did not see Beverly in her bosky nook and she did not feel called upon to reveal herself to them.
“It was all very well to stick three of us together when we were freshmen and sophomores, but juniors deserve some consideration I think. If Peggy Westfield had come back this year it would have been all well and good, but to put a perfect stranger in that room is a pure and simple outrage. Why we haven’t even an idea what she’s like, or whether she’ll be congenial, or nice, or—or—anything. Why couldn’t she have given us one of the girls we know?” stormed Sally.
“Because she likes to prove that she is great and we are small, I dare say,” answered Aileen. “Of course the new girl may be perfectly lovely and maybe we’ll get to like her a lot, but it’s the principle of the thing which enrages me. It seems to me we might have some voice in the choice of a room-mate after being in the school three years. There are a dozen in our class from which we could choose the third girl if we’ve got to have her, though I don’t see why just you and I couldn’t have a suite to ourselves. Mercy knows there are enough rooms in our wing and next year we’ll have to be in the main house anyway, and I just loathe the thought of it too.”