“Really, she acts like a tame cat. What do you suppose has happened to Hester?” demanded Laura’s chum, Jess Morse, in the dressing room.
But Laura kept her own counsel.
The basket-ball game went off splendidly. So did most of the exercises. The dancing, that was interspersed between the games, pleased the parents immensely. And the final number—the dance around the Maypole erected in the middle of the green—was as pretty an outdoor picture as one could imagine, despite the fact that the girls wore dark gymnasium suits.
At the end, the running and skipping on the grass delighted the parents. To see these girls, so merry and untrammeled, with the natural grace of healthy bodies displayed in their movements, was charming. At the end of the afternoon Laura saw Colonel Swayne in close consultation with Mr. Sharp and members of the Board of Education. But the girl heard no particulars of that conference until she went to school the following Monday morning.
Just before noon she chanced to have an errand in the principal’s office. Mr. Sharp looked up at the young girl as she entered, nodded to her, and said, with a smile:
“And how does Central High’s fairy-godmother do to-day?”
Laura looked astonished, but she smiled. “Do you mean me, Mr. Sharp?”
“Who else would I mean?” he asked, chuckling. “Haven’t you heard the news?”
“Not that I was a fairy-godmother,” she returned, puzzled.
“Don’t you know that in the estimation of a certain gentleman you are the very smartest and wittiest girl who goes to this school? Because you made a thunderstorm for him, and saved a man from falling from a church steeple, he believes that it is athletics for you girls that puts the wit into your heads! But I tell him, in your case, it is ‘Mother wit.’”