The others gasped and Rosamond asked, “Gertrude, do you mean that this backwoodsy girl with that awful name, Matilda Perkins, is to room with the snobbish Lady Stuckup?”
Trudy nodded, and Peggy, whose bump of mischief and merriment seemed sometimes to be more prominent than her bump of sympathy, laughingly declared, “Girls, it would be as good as a circus to see them when they first meet.”
“Oh, Peggy, how can you speak that way?” Adele remonstrated. “I just know that it is going to be ever so hard for both of them.”
“I’m sure that I don’t care how uncomfortable that English girl is made,” Doris Drexel remarked. “Carol overheard her saying that she thinks it is dreadful because there are no class distinctions in America. She was telling Miss Merritt that there isn’t one pupil attending Linden Hall who would be in her class in England.”
“Well, then, why doesn’t she go back to her native land?” Peggy inquired. “No one is begging her to stay here that I know of.”
“Her father is traveling in the West, Madame Deriby told me,” Evelyn replied. “He will soon come after her, and then she will leave our plebeian shores forever.”
“Girls!” Adele suddenly exclaimed with enthusiasm, “Matilda Perkins may be countrified, but there is something about those wonderful eyes of hers that makes me feel sure that she can hold her own even with Peggy’s Lady Stuckup, but, Gertrude, you haven’t told us where Matilda came from. Have you heard as yet?”
“She hails from the Dakota prairies,” the older girl replied. “Her mother was a well-educated woman who married a ranchman and she taught her little girl and her two boys as best she could, but, when Matilda was twelve, she and her brothers became orphans, and since that time she has kept house for them and helped on the farm, but, Adele, if you want to see Matilda’s eyes glow, you must hear her tell about her prairie home. I will bring her up here this evening, if Madame Deriby will excuse us from the recreation hour in the hall.”
Then she added, springing up, “There’s the get-ready-for-supper bell. I must hunt up Matilda this very minute or she will be losing herself in the maze of corridors.”