“Oh, they are nice enough,” replied Belle. “Elinor Butler is really quite nice, but they are not just our sort, don’t you know, and mamma has always cautioned me to be very careful about my companions.”
“Elinor Butler?” questioned Billie. “She is my old friend, and Nancy Brown and Mary Price? Aren’t any of them members?”
Just then the gong for chapel boomed out in the September stillness and Belle could only shake her head for denial, as the two girls hurried into the building.
“I don’t think I could ever get on with that blonde doll baby,” thought Billie, as she followed Belle into the chapel for morning prayer, which always opened the day at West Haven High School.
At recess the new sophomore was quite overwhelmed by the attentions of the Mystic Seven. They showed her the building and the grounds, the class locker rooms and the gymnasium, which interested her most of all. And in return she showed them her motor car. But, somehow, she did not quite like these stylish and rather over-dressed young girls. Their conversation really bored her and she was disappointed.
It had been her own suggestion to go to West Haven High School when her father was summoned abroad to build a railroad.
“I think it’s high time I met some nice outdoor girls, papa,” she had said. “I am afraid of boarding school girls. They are so different from you.”
Her father had laughed joyfully over this speech.
“I hope there’s not much resemblance between me and a boarding school girl, my little Billie,” he said, pinching her cheek.
And now the nice open-air girls whom she had recalled with pleasure after a summer spent in West Haven had not come near enough even to greet her and she had been obliged to pair off with seven fashion plates.