“Where on earth do you pick up all your news, Jerry?” asked Constance Stevens. “You always seem to know everything about everybody.”
“Oh, it just happens to come my way,” grinned Jerry. “I heard about Miss Archer from my father. He’s just been elected to the Board of Education.”
“She isn’t really going to leave Sanford High, is she, Jerry?” An anxious frown puckered Marjorie’s smooth forehead. She hated to think of high school without Miss Archer.
“No. At first she thought she would, but afterward she decided that she’d rather stay here. She told father that she had grown so fond of the dear old school she couldn’t bear to leave it. I’m certainly glad she’s not going to resign. If she did we might have kind, delightful Miss Merton for a principal. Then—good night!” Jerry relapsed into slang to emphasize her disgust of such a possibility.
“I shouldn’t like that,” Marjorie remarked bluntly. “Still, I can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for Miss Merton. She shuts out all the bright, pleasant things in life and just sticks to the disagreeable ones. Sometimes I wonder if she was ever young or had ever been happy.”
“She’s been a regular Siberian crab-apple ever since I can remember,” grumbled Jerry. “Why, when I was a kidlet in knee skirts she was the terror of Sanford High. I guess she must have been crossed in love about a hundred years ago.” Jerry giggled a trifle wickedly.
“She was,” affirmed quiet Irma with a smile, “but not a hundred years ago. I never knew it until this summer.”
“Here is something I don’t seem to know about,” satirized Jerry. “How did that happen, I wonder?”
“Don’t keep us in suspense, Irma,” implored Muriel Harding. “If Miss Merton ever had a love affair it’s your duty to tell us about it. I can’t imagine such an impossibility. Did it happen here in Sanford? How did you come to hear of it?”
A circle of eager faces were turned expectantly toward Irma. “My aunt, whom I visited this summer, told me about it,” she began. “She lived in Sanford when she was a girl and knew Miss Merton then. They went to school together. There were no high schools then; just an academy for young men and women. Miss Merton was really a pretty girl. She had pink cheeks and bright eyes and beautiful, heavy, dark hair. She had a sister, too, who wasn’t a bit pretty.