"And you a new girl, too," said another, looking at Billie with admiring eyes.
From that time on Billie became a noted figure among the hundred girls at Three Towers Hall, and her fame and popularity grew in leaps and bounds.
Rose Belser viewed this new state of affairs calmly at first, then with alarm, and later with dismay. That a new girl should come to Three Towers and immediately begin to shoulder herself into the limelight was unthinkable, impossible, it couldn't be done. And yet Billie Bradley was doing it!
After a while she began to draw away from Billie, look indifferent when one of the girls spoke of her praisingly, slighted her in a hundred little ways that Billie herself could hardy put her finger on. And yet she felt it.
Billie had one other constant enemy at Three Towers, and that was Miss Cora. Miss Cora never missed a chance to humiliate her—or at least try to humiliate her. But Billie was so happy and having such a wonderful time that she never gave these attempts any more attention than she would so many mosquito bites, thereby fanning Miss Cora's dislike of her.
Meanwhile the two Miss Dills grew more and more sour and crabbed until the girls began to wonder "why they didn't die of it." Then one noon time Laura came running into the dormitory, her eyes big and round with excitement.
"What do you think?" she cried, while the girls gathered round her. "I heard Miss Cora and Miss Ada talking together. I was in the lab and they were in the hall and they didn't know I was anywhere around."
"Well?" asked the girls impatiently as she paused for breath.
"They were talking about our meals," Laura went on. "They said we got altogether too much to eat."
"Too much to eat!" echoed the girls, looking at one another wonderingly.