"You didn't give me a chance. Well, Rose Barclay is going, and two other freshmen whom I don't think you know, Clara Fair and Ethel Bird—and Lobelia Parkins."
"Peggy Montfort! why do you go with that little animal? I've told you before that I could not, for the honour of the corridor, have you seen with a creature that looks like that. Let her go with Colney Hatch if she wants company; they'd be two of a kind."
"Colney Hatch is one of the brightest girls in school, Miss Cortlandt says so!"
"Very likely; but that doesn't make her a fit associate for you, my Veezy-vee. You never seem to understand about different sets. I want you to belong to the smart set, and you won't."
"Do the Owls belong to it?" demanded Peggy, turning red.
"Peggy, how dense you are! The Owls don't belong to any set because they won't. Of course they could belong to any set they pleased."
"Does Grace Wolfe belong to it?"
"The Goat? Why, she used to; but she's so awfully queer, you know; the Goat has grown too awfully queer for anything. She stays by herself mostly, ever since she cut loose from the Gang. And Vivia is gone," she wailed, "and Blanche Haight,—Blanchey was not very nice, but her gowns fitted like a seraph's, and the style to her hats was too perfectly killing for anything, you know it was. And now there isn't any one, not a single soul, that I care to talk to about clothes. I've had my pink waist done over, and it's simply dandy—the sweetest thing you ever saw in your life; and nobody cares. I am so unhappy!"
"I haven't seen that new hat you told me about!" said Peggy, with a happy stroke of diplomacy. If any one had told Margaret Montfort that her Peggy would ever develop a talent for diplomacy she would have opened her eyes wide indeed; but one learns many things at boarding-school.
Viola brightened at once.