No one paid any attention to her until after grace had been said by the dean and the girls were all seated. “Staying with Madge, Sidney?” asked one, unfolding her napkin and taking up her spoon for her fruit.
“This, girls,” said Madge, without the suspicion of a smile, “is my new room-mate, Shirley Harcourt. She got in last night. Shirley, this is Betty Terhune.” Madge continued the introductions around the table, at which there was no teacher, one of the senior girls occupying the place at the head. Some of the girls gave Shirley a second look, as she acknowledged the introductions, but most of them thought that it was a joke.
“Oh, what’s the point of this?” asked Betty. “I suppose you stayed all night with Madge, Sidney. Your new room-mate is going to be pretty late in her classes, Madge.”
Shirley now sat quietly, eating her orange and smiling aside at Madge. “Listen, girls,” said that young lady. “I don’t blame you for thinking it a joke. I could scarcely believe Shirley this morning when I finally got awake and found her there. But if you don’t believe me, look over there at Sidney Thorne!”
The astonished girls looked toward the table at which they were accustomed to see Sidney Thorne. Sure enough, there she was, calmly eating her fruit, with no idea of the surprise in store for her. Shirley was as much interested as the rest and gave a comprehensive look at this heretofore elusive double of hers.
“My!” Betty exclaimed. “Even the profile is the same! Why, how could it happen? Are you sure that you are not related?”
“It must be very distantly, if we are. I never heard of any relatives by that name.” Shirley felt decidedly strange. It was like a dream to be here in this different but attractive school, so far from her mother and father, where a girl who looked almost exactly like her, so far as she could see, was already a pupil in the school.
“Tell me about Sidney Thorne,” she said to Betty. “You can’t imagine what a queer surprise it is to find a girl so like me here!”
“I can imagine how I would feel,” sympathetically said Betty. “But if you have to have a double, it is a good thing that she is a nice girl. Sidney lives in Chicago, as Madge may already have told you. She hasn’t any brothers or sisters that I ever heard of, but occasionally her mother and father drive here to see her. They have all kinds of money and they are very fine, cultured people,—so everybody says. Her mother is just the prettiest thing!
“Sidney is one of the smartest girls in school. She belongs to a little crowd that they call the ‘Double Three,’ since a Hallowe’en stunt last year, but they are only her most intimate friends. She’s in almost every club there is here.”