“There’s very little waitin’-on to be done at noon, thanks for that,” Miss O’Hara said. “Most things are on the table, but you’ll have to go around and pour the chocolate and do the things as I told you. There now! The bell’s ringing and I hear those silly girls laughing, so they’re all in the dining room. Here’s the chocolate pot. I haven’t filled it full, fearin’ it might be too heavy. You’ll have to come back and get more when that’s gone.”
With cheeks flushed and eyes shining, as though she were about to do something which pleased her extremely, Jenny entered the dining room, where four tables, surrounded by girls, stood along the walls. Few there were who even noticed her as she went from place to place filling the dainty cups with steaming liquid.
At the first table the girls were chattering about a theatre party to which they were going with Miss Granger, and not one of them gave the waitress more than a fleeting glance. But at the second table Jenny found the girl she sought. The sister of Harold P-J, and the daughter of the proud owner of Rocky Point Farm.
The little waitress knew at once which she was, for a companion spoke her name. Jenny was disappointed when she heard her speak. There was a fretful, discontented note in her voice. And why should there be, she wondered, as she slowly approached the end of the table where Gwynette Poindexter-Jones sat with an intimate friend from San Francisco at each side.
Surely she had everything her heart could desire. But evidently this was not true, for, as Jenny drew nearer, she could hear what was being said.
“Patricia Sullivan, you make me weary! You certainly do!” she addressed the girl on her right. “How can you say that this is a pleasant place? When I think of my mother in France luxuriating in the sort of life I most enjoy, it makes me rebellious. Sometimes I feel that I just can’t forgive her. What right has a mother to send her daughter to an out-of-the-way country boarding school if the girl prefers to be educated abroad?”
The friend who had been called “Patricia” now put in, almost apologetically: “But I merely said that it is a beautiful country, and I repeat that it is. I think that it is wonderful to be so high up on a foothill and have a sweeping view of the ocean from one side of the school and a view of the mountains from the other side.”
A shrug, accompanied by an utterance of bored impatience, then Gwynette’s reply: “Scenery isn’t what I want, and if I did, I prefer it in France.”
After glancing critically from one table to another, she continued:
“There isn’t a single girl in this room who belongs to our class, really. They are all our social inferiors.”