"Maybe we'll find out after we've been here a while. But I tell you one thing, I like her better without any smiles than that silly Helen Gwendolyn Doolittle with her everlasting affected giggling at nothing. She is the kind to do some silly thing and make us all ashamed of her."
"How about Stella Drummond?"
"She is a puzzle to me. Doesn't she seem an awful lot older than the rest of us? Rosalie says she is eighteen and that's not so much older, but she seems about twenty-five. I wonder why?"
"Maybe she has lived in cities all her life and gone out a lot. You know most of the girls we met up at New London seemed so much older too, yet they really were not. They looked upon us as children, though the Little Mother said we were years older in common sense while they were years older in worldly experience,—I wonder what she meant?"
"Tanta meant that we had stayed young girls and could enjoy fun and frolic as much as ever, but those girls were not satisfied with anything but dances and theatres and all sorts of grown-up things. We have our fun with our horses, dogs and the nonsense with the boys up home. We want our skirts short and our hair flying and to romp when we feel like it."
"Picture Helen or Lily Pearl romping," and Peggy dove under the covers to smother her laughter at the thought of the fat, pudgy Lily Pearl attempting anything of the sort. Polly snickered in sympathy and then said in her emphatic way:
"I tell you, Peggy, which girls I do like and I think they will like us: Marjorie Terry and Natalie Vincent. Marjorie is awfully sober and quiet, I know, but I believe she's sort of lonely, or homesick or something. Natalie seems more like our own kind than any girl in the school and I'll wager my tennis racquet she'll be lots of fun if she is the Principal's daughter. But we'd better go to sleep this minute. We've made a sort of hash of seven girls, and if we try to size up the whole school this way it will be broad daylight before we finish. Good-night. It's sort of nice to be here after all, and nicer still to have you for a room-mate, old Peggoty."
An appreciative little laugh was the only answer to this and five minutes later the moon was looking in upon a picture hard to duplicate in this great world: Two sweet, unspoiled, beautiful girls in the first flush of untroubled slumber.
The following morning being Saturday and Peggy's and Polly's belongings having arrived, the girls set about arranging their room, half a dozen others having volunteered assistance. For convenience in reaching "up aloft" Peggy and Polly had slipped off their waists and were arrayed in kimonos which aroused the envy of their companions. Captain Stewart had given them to his "twins" as he now called the girls. Peggy's was the richest shade of crimson embroidered in all manner of golden gods and dragons; Polly's pale blue with silver chrysanthemums.
"Oh, where did they come from?" cried Natalie.