“I’m sure of it!” Virginia’s voice expressed her confidence. “I have a free hour now and we’ll go over it together.”
The weeks that followed were indeed busy ones. Each of the older girls in Madame La Fleur’s sewing class was to make her own dainty white dress for the closing party, and, at almost any free hour groups of merry maids could be seen gathered first in one room and then in another hemming, basting and ruffling, for those little “French gowns,” as Babs called them, were to be made every stitch of them by hand.
“This would have been jolly fun,” Betsy declared, “if it wasn’t for the fact that final exams are hanging so heavily over our heads.”
Virg, of course, solved this problem by suggesting that one girl read history while the others sewed. This they did and at the end of each chapter the book was passed to someone else that the former reader might not lose too much time from the making of her gown.
“I’m glad it’s the history of France,” Sally remarked during a pause in which the book was being passed from one to another. “That seems sort of appropriate since we are making French dresses. Madame La Fleur even had the material sent from her brother’s shop in Paris.”
“It doesn’t look like mere muslin does it?” Babs held up a shimmering length to let the sun shine through it. “It’s heaps more like gossamer, but Dicky, do go on with the reading.”
“Very well. This chapter is called ‘Reaction and New Discontent.’ ‘It was said of the Bourbons that they never forgot anything and never learned anything.’”
“This is rather paradoxical, isn’t it?” Margaret began, when Betsy teasingly interrupted. “Whizzle, Megsy! What a word! You certainly have learned something and didn’t forget it either. Why if I could say such a long one as that right off easy, I’d think I was ready to graduate.”
“Hush, Bets. Just because you aren’t trying for the Honor Roll is no reason why the rest of us don’t want to study.” Sally spoke her thoughts these days as independently as did the others.
Betsy flashed. “Just for that I’m going to finish the paragraph.” Which she did, rattling off information about Louis eighteenth in a manner to make several of the girls present open their eyes in amazement, but before they could declare that they believed Betsy had a book hidden in her sewing and was reading it, a gong called them to another task.