“Yes.”
Shirley, who had been writing up her notes from the class before the chapel exercises, had been dimly conscious of this conversation, but on hearing her name, she paused in the movement of her pencil and looked toward Madge’s back. Well, let them talk. She was tired of reminding people!
“She is probably from some little country town and this is the biggest place she ever saw,” continued Sidney. “I suppose her father is some village school teacher that teaches Latin. Didn’t you say that he made her get ahead on her Virgil?”
“Yes,” again said Madge, wavering between her loyalty to Shirley and her customary admiration for Sidney, attractive, influential girl, that she was. “I don’t know anything about her family. She reads her letters and puts them away, but she gets some from abroad.”
“Somebody must have sold a farm,” lightly said Sidney, whose speech indicated no spiteful feelings in intonation, but surely did not spring from any sympathy of heart.
Shirley set her lips together and began to write slowly again. She was angry for the first time. Before she left this school the girls should know who her father was and that even country school teachers—supposing he had been one—and the people on the farms that raised everything foolish Sidney had to eat—but Shirley made her resentful thoughts stop racing on. How silly she was! People who had those ideas would probably keep them. What difference did it make?
“Well, Sid,” Fleta was saying, “you’d better be careful how you make fun of your double. She may be related to you, you know.”
“Not a chance of it,” said Sidney. “It’s just one of those freaks of nature by which we happen to look alike now. We’ll probably change in a few years, except for our coloring, and I think that my hair is a little lighter than hers.”
“Yes, and you are not quite so tall as Shirley, Sid,” said Fleta. “I noticed it first when you both stood up together from the same table in Kenosha.”
“It would be funny if you went to the same university, wouldn’t it? Shirley is going to college, she says.”