Strangely enough, the girls could always tell just how the week had affected her nerves, by her choice of books on Friday night.
“It’s Tennyson to-day, girls,” Sue had told the rest, when she came through the garden after seeking Crullers. “Spring calls to the Lady Honoria. She’s reading ‘The Princess’ with a bunch of red and yellow tulips on her lap.”
“Just as sure a sign of summer as ripening buds,” Isabel had added, happily. “All through the winter, don’t you remember, girls, she read Whittier and Milton, and now she’s put all the old chilly poets back into the library, and has her own small, handy volumes of Browning and Burns and even Whitman. She says she likes the poetry in springtime that makes you think of freshly turned earth and upspringing buds.”
“What a good old darling she is,” Ruth said in her serious, grandmotherly way. “I found her this morning standing before the old painting in the hall, and I’m sure there were tears in her eyes, girls.”
The girls were silent. The Calvert spirit towards its principal was very peculiar. The girls loved and honored her, but mingled with both sentiments was a curiously protective feeling too. The story of Calvert had passed into the realm of romantic tradition with its students, and they held it sacred. Every new girl was taken apart by Polly and Ruth and solemnly initiated into it. They were told how Honoria and her younger sister had been left well-nigh penniless at the death of their father, old Orrin Calvert, thirty years before. They had been brought up in seclusion, and fed on all the old traditions of Queen’s Ferry as it had been from the days that followed on the Jamestown settlement. The main teaching they had received was that no Calvert should work for a living. But after the old gentleman’s passing, and a long talk with the family lawyer from Richmond, Miss Honoria had felt tradition and sentiment slip from her like a worn-out garment.
All that was left of the old estate, when her father’s obligations were canceled, was Calvert Hall; and the excellent education both young women possessed was their sole capital. Yet the two had faced the issue contentedly and courageously, like other Dixie girls of the newer generation, and had turned the old Hall into a home school for young girls.
Later Miss Diantha, the younger sister, had married. She lived in the West, but the Hall remained the same, a landmark at Queen’s Ferry.
Sometimes it seemed to the girls in the great, somber stone house, as though the tender spirit and influence of Diantha still lived there, and made her stately sister more tolerant in dealing with the merry, youthful natures over which she ruled.
At the foot of the broad oaken staircase, was a full-length oil painting of the sisters, when they were girls. Quaint, old-fashioned portraits they were, too, with Honoria in white mulle with pink rosebuds, and Diantha in white mulle with forget-me-nots scattered over its flounces. Honoria’s chin was up, and she looked right ahead, just as calmly and as serenely as she did to-day in the classroom. But Diantha’s head was half averted, and she was smiling shyly, and the little rows of short up-and-down curls around her head seemed ready to bob and tremble at any moment with a laugh.
“Do you know, girls,” Polly would say, after a fresh inspection of the painting, “I think the old darling hung it there so that all her girls would try to pattern themselves after it. I only wish we could.”