“Yes,” answered Isabel, “after all our trouble to find that kitten, and me coaxin’ Cathalina half a day more or less!”
“But maybe we’ve started a real romance,” suggested Eloise.
“What did you do with the kitty?” asked Cathalina.
“It’s all right. Dotty Banks, one of the little girls, was to watch for it and take it back if necessary, and she showed me a long fresh scratch it gave her, so I guess she caught it all right!”
“I’m glad it turned out as it did,” said Cathalina later, as she and Hilary were at their lessons. “We aren’t allowed to play practical jokes at home. If it had—a—mortified her at all, I’d have felt guilty, although,” and here Cathalina’s lips set firmly a moment,—“she deserves ’most anything for the way she does in class.”
“Father says that when we try to pay back it hurts us the worst,” replied Hilary. “I’m not preaching, please, but such pranks take a lot of time and aren’t so very smart or funny in the end. Let’s try to keep out of them. If you could get hold of Isabel, Cathalina, you would do her a lot of good. She and Avalon just about worship you.”
CHAPTER IX
GOSSIP
As the days went by, Cathalina became accustomed to her new surroundings and the school routine, with the stimulating life in the midst of much young companionship. Yet no one knew just what it cost her to overcome her timidity. She was, to be sure, not the only young girl at Greycliff who was learning lessons of self-reliance, and the very knowledge of that fact helped her. Pride, also, came to the rescue. She was not going to appear like a dunce, not she! And as confidence grew, she discovered that many even of the older girls, for all the superior years and wisdom for which she had given them credit, could not recite as correctly as she, nor cared, apparently, to use their brains in thinking things out.
“Why, Helen,” she said one day to Helen Paget, as they came together from Randolph, where their Literature class had been reciting, “Victoria Parker did not even blush when she made that awful mistake today.”
“O, she really hasn’t enough sense, Cathalina, to know how bad it was, and doesn’t care anyhow. She’s one of the ‘Simps.’ Her father sent her here, I heard, because she was so silly and he was afraid she might run away to be married.”