Janice was having a good time at school. She found the girls attending the Middletown Seminary quite to her taste. They were hearty, healthy, sensible; and most of them were very kind to her. The management of the school was excellent. The teachers had just enough oversight of the girls, out of classes as well as in, to keep up the proper relationship between the pupils and themselves.
Mrs. Protherick, the principal, was a very lovely lady, Janice thought; and the under teachers all treated the day scholar from Polktown with most delightful friendliness. Janice was very busy with her studies, for she felt her deficiencies. Two years makes a long break in one’s education. But such time as she had to spend with her fellow pupils delighted the girl from Polktown.
One change in Janice which the school soon made pleased her aunt. She bought several ready-to-wear dresses in Middletown, and Aunt ’Mira was allowed to go along and help pick them out. Nor did Aunt ’Mira lack good sense in the selection of frocks for a girl of her niece’s age; it was only in her own adornment that she was inclined to go to extremes.
The run back and forth in the car was usually a very pleasant one. The Vermont woods were aflame with fall glories. Sometimes on the way to the seminary she loaded her car with gorgeous branches for the adornment of her friends’ rooms; or, going home, she stopped to pick up glossy brown chestnuts under the trees, or shake down hickory nuts in their golden-brown sheaths.
She seldom failed to take the Upper Road coming home from school, and had found a short-cut through a private lane into the wood road that passed the Trimmins’ cabin. So she saw much of those wild children, including the girl with the black hair.
Not that she spoke much with them, for usually if Janice undertook to address one of them, there was a pert response, especially from Jinny or the red-haired boy, Tom. But the little ones began to be more friendly, for she secretly bought their confidence with lollypops and other goodies.
Virginia had had some schooling, it was plain. Janice frequently caught the wild little mob playing school, and the black-haired girl was always the teacher. Janice tried to interest her in a meeting that had been planned for on a Saturday afternoon in the old vestry of the Union Church.
“You will like it, Virginia,” she said to the scowling, doubtful young Arab. “It’s just a society for girls of your age—nobody there to boss you, or make you do anything you don’t like. And after the society is organized, the girls are going to have lots of good times.”
“What doing?” demanded Jinny.
“For one thing, they are going to sew dolls’ clothes. There will be somebody there to teach you just how to cut them out, and fit them, and sew them. And——”