“Oh, I don’t mind,” Starr replied brightly, “since you girls are kind to me, I shall not care how unkind she may be.”
A truly unpleasant experience awaited this girl from the Dakota prairie.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LADY STUCKUP
When Gertrude Willis rapped on a closed door in the east wing, there was no response and so she turned the knob and entered the room which was unoccupied. Trudie then told the new pupil which was to be her side and bade her good-night.
When she was alone, Matilda stood looking out of the window into the darkness. For a moment a rush of loneliness swept over her heart. The stars seemed so faint and far away, while over the prairie they had seemed so near and brilliant. Then she smiled as she thought bravely, “I mustn’t be homesick, for wonderful things are going to happen to me, and every one has been so kind.”
Humming a little tune, the new pupil unpacked her old-fashioned and much-battered suit-case, and a few moments thereafter she climbed into her bed.
Then the door opened and a tall, flaxen-haired girl entered. She might have been pretty had it not been for a haughty, disagreeable expression. She gave a disdainful glance toward the occupied bed and retired behind her sheltering screen.
Only that evening had she heard who was to be her roommate and she had been waiting until this late hour to see Madame Deriby, who had at last sent word that she could not see Geraldine until the morning. Long after Matilda, truly weary from her long journey, was peacefully sleeping, the haughty English girl lay awake planning what she would say to the matron. She, a Barrington, to be asked to share her room with a farmer’s daughter. Such a slight was unbearable! If Madame Deriby did not know of her father’s position in England, then his daughter would inform her at the very first opportunity.
Hours before the rising bell rang in the Linden Hall Seminary Matilda was awake, for out on her wide prairie every one was astir at early dawn. She did not want to disturb her roommate, the haughty Geraldine Barrington, and so she lay quietly gazing out of her window at the tree-tops and the shining sky, but she saw neither, except vaguely, for in fancy she was out on the prairie watching the sun rise, hearing the morning call of the meadow-larks and orioles and bobolinks. Even the harsh-voiced cowbirds and the thieving crows were there in her memoried picture, for they all meant home to her. She could see her brother Basil, the handsomest lad in all the world, she thought, as he swung into his saddle and herded the cattle down by the river.
Her older brother, Cedric, she knew would be swinging along after the plow with Shep bounding in front of the horses. Then, in imagination, she looked into the kitchen. She was sure that the boys found it hard to keep house without her. For a moment a rush of regret brought tears to her eyes.