“I don’t ask for your opinion, Annie. I’m quite accustomed to the scornful way in which you have received all my words lately. I need not tell you what I have heard at all, unless you wish to hear it.”
“But, of course, I wish to hear it, Rosie; you know that as well as I do. Now sit down and make yourself at home, there’s a dear.”
Rose allowed herself to be mollified.
“Well,” she said, sinking back into Miss Day’s most comfortable chair, “the feud between a certain small person and a certain great person grows apace.” Miss Day’s small eyes began to dance.
“You know I am interested in that subject,” she said. She flopped down on the floor by Rosalind Merton’s side. “Go on, my love,” she murmured; “describe the development of the enmity.”
“Little things show the way the wind is blowing,” pursued Rose. “I was coming along the corridor just now, and I met the angelic and unworldly Priscilla. Her eyelids were red as if she had been crying. She passed me without a word.”
“Well?”
“That’s all.”
“Rose, you really are too provoking. I thought you had something very fine to tell.”
“The feud grows,” pursued Rose. “I know it by many signs. Prissie is not half so often with Maggie as she used to be. Maggie means to get out of this friendship, but she is too proud not to do it gradually. There is not a more jealous girl in this college than Maggie, but neither is there a prouder. Do you suppose that anything under the sun would allow her to show her feelings because that little upstart dared to raise her eyes to Maggie’s adorable beau, Mr Hammond? But oh, she feels it; she feels it down in her secret soul. She hates Prissie; she hates this beautiful handsome lover of hers for being civil to so commonplace a person. She is only waiting for a decent pretext to drop Prissie altogether. I wish with all my heart I could give her one.”