“I do hate to do this, though, Hilary.”
“All the more credit to you, then, for doing it. Here are your first lines,” and Hilary, who had begun to study over again her own part, turned the pages to Helena’s first speech. “Here you are, addressing Evelyn as Hermia:
“Call you me fair? That fair again unsay.
Demetrius loves your fair, O, happy fair!”
“I do like her lines, the words are so musical,—‘your tongue’s sweet air more tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear’.”
“Oh, you will like it when you get at it. You ought to have heard Dorothy Appleton rave about being Bottom, but she thinks it great fun now. Did you see her at the last practice? She said she was not sure which string she was pulling in the donkey’s head. She might make his ears wiggle when his eyes ought to blink, but we told her that we didn’t think it mattered.”
Greycliff days were taking wing. The week fairly flew till its important close. On Friday night, the Whittiers and Emersons gathered in the chapel for the Inter-Society Debate. Isabel, with pink cheeks and cold hands, had bid her friends goodbye with the remark that she was marching to her doom, but Virginia was “as calm as an oyster,” to quote Isabel.
“Do you think that Isabel was nervous enough to hurt?” asked Cathalina, who was a little worried. “You know how sure she was over the canoe race.”
“That was different,” replied Juliet, who sat next to Cathalina. “She has to remember a speech this time, and while Isabel is such a fine debater, I think she dreads this occasion. It is more important to the girls.”
But if Isabel was nervous beforehand, when she appeared on the stage platform she was perfectly at ease and never had debated with more brilliance. Virginia, too, never appeared to better advantage, and Lilian thought as she looked at the fine-looking girl on the platform, so earnest, so well prepared, of what Greycliff had meant to Virgie since that day when she had gone in to comfort the discouraged girl from the Dakota ranch. It was scarcely possible to believe that Virginia was the same girl, nor was she quite. A bigger outlook, a more unselfish ambition and a sweeter poise was hers.
The judges were not out long, and the decision was unanimous for the Whittier team. The annual banner, which for another year would grace the Whittier hall, was presented by one of the trustees, and accepted by Isabel, representing the team.