“I am,” said Robbie Belle.
“You are!” Miss Cutter pushed the green shade farther up on her high forehead. “Well, I must say!” She surveyed her roommate with new interest. “How exceedingly extraordinary!”
Robbie shifted her weight to the other foot. “I didn’t want to be,” she said.
“No, of course not, and you nothing but a child yourself. It must be your height and that grave way you have of staring. With that baby-face, couldn’t they see that your dignity is all on the outside?”
Robbie said nothing, but if Miss Cutter had not been quite so near-sighted she might have spied deep in the violet eyes a glint of black remotely resembling anger.
“Think of appealing to a sixteen-year-old infant—really you are literally in-fans, which is to say, one without the power of speech! Fancy me applying to you to compel quiet in the halls! Imagine that boisterous crowd trailing after Miss Abbott and Miss Leigh et al.—Hist!” She lifted her head like a warhorse sniffing battle near. “There they are now.”
Robbie Belle lifted her head too and listened, although indeed the noise would have penetrated to the most inattentive ears. A multitude of feet were marching lock-step past the door to a chorus of giggling, stifled squeals and groans, while at intervals a voice choking with emotion rose in shrill accents: “There was an old woman all skin and bones, o-o-oh!” When it faltered and collapsed on the o-o-oh, the other voices joined in and dragged out the syllable to lugubrious and harrowing length. Then some one giggled hysterically and another squealed. The soloist took up the verse: “She went to the church to pray, o-o-oh!” The chorus wailed and moaned and croaked and whimpered and groaned in concert. Miss Cutter regarded Robbie Belle sternly.
Robbie Belle’s shoulders rose and fell over a deep breath. She stepped across to the door and closed the transom softly just as the next weird line hissed out above the tumult and then sank into its smothering welter and moan of vowels. Robbie spoke more loudly.
“One of them said that they were going to dress up in sheets and pillow-cases to-night. They are practicing for the Hallowe’en party. It’s only fun.”
Berta’s voice—it was Berta who did the solo—here rose in a quavering shriek that halted not for keys in their holes or transoms in their sockets: “The worms crawled in and the worms crawled out, o-o-o-oh!”