“You’re in my class, aren’t you?” she whispered quickly. “It’s right over here, and there’s a seat beside me. I don’t know anyone either, and I’m so glad to see you, so I’ll have someone to talk to.”
Jeannette never answered, but smiled with a quick flash of appreciation, the smile which always seemed to illumine her grave face. She followed Kit back to her seat, and Georgia exchanged glances with her right-hand neighbor, Amy Parker. Kit was altogether too new to realize just exactly what she had done. Being the Dean’s grandniece, she considered herself unconsciously a privileged person. As a matter of course, Della had accompanied her that morning and introduced her to four or five girls in the junior prep class, who came from the representative best families of the town. Also, as a matter of course, she had been welcomed as one of them, but Kit, with her inborn democratic ideas, never even realized that she occupied one of the seats of the mighty, in a circle of the favored few, and that she had smashed all tradition by introducing into that circle a Flambeau. In fact, even if she had known, she would probably have been thoroughly indignant at any such spirit among the girls themselves.
The whole morning was taken up with the assigning of students to classes. Kit loved the curious bustle and excitement of it all. It was so different from the small high school back home, and there were many more boys and girls than she had expected to see. Almost, as she passed from room to room, through the different buildings, she wished she were staying there as a year pupil. Amy introduced her to her closest friend, Peggy Barrows, a girl from South Dakota, who took them up to her quarters in one of the dormitories.
“Gee,” Kit said, looking around her, “I wish I were going to live here. Peggy, you’ll have to entertain us often. It’s so kind of solitary and restful, isn’t it, up here?”
“Solitary,” scoffed Peggy. “I’ve been here four days getting settled, and you might just as well call the side show of a circus solitary. There isn’t even the ghost of privacy. I’m mobbed every time I try to sit and collect my thoughts.”
“Who wants to collect their thoughts, anyway?” asked Amy.
“Have you seen Virginia’s room? Wait.” Peggy darted out of her door and across the hall. On the door opposite a card bore the legend in large black letters:
KEEP OUT
STUDY HOUR
“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said, tapping just the same. “Nobody’s studying today. Let us in, Ginny.”
A sound of scraping over the floor, and muffled giggles came to waiting ones in the hall, then the door was thrown wide, and Kit caught her first glimpse of Virginia Parks, the most popular girl at Hope. She was about seventeen, but a short, pudgy type, with curly rumpled hair and blue eyes. There were five other girls with her, and papers littered the bed, chairs, and desk.