“She isn’t exactly, but somehow she seems to love opposition. I don’t know her well. This is only my second term, I came last Spring, but Jack Corday could climb a flag pole if she wanted to. She’s a wiz at gym, but books! She has about as much use for a book as an Indian has,” declared the accommodating Pat. “Just the same I love her.”
“My friend Trixy seems to have struck an iceberg,” further commented Gloria. The “iceberg” being the ashen blonde called Mary Mears.
“Oh, I don’t know her, she’s new,” replied Pat. “But even icebergs melt finally. She’s rather pretty, isn’t she?”
“Rather,” agreed Gloria just as Trixy joined her group on the corner bench.
CHAPTER II
TELLING TRIXY
By the merest chance Gloria did not tell Trixy of the trunk incident. Not that she had any intention of keeping from her friend such an interesting possibility, but because—well, each time she thought of it something intervened, until after days and then more than a week passed, the tale seemed too stale to be revived.
Pat proved delightfully amusing, Mary Mears was mysterious and Jacquinot Corday so spectacular that the first month at Altmount went by without a dull day or even a lonely night for Gloria.
Trixy Travers was at the finishing school chiefly because Gloria Doane had inveigled her into coming. As the fashionable and popular girl at Sandford, where her father was an important manufacturer, Trixy had enjoyed good times unlimited, but as Gloria was due to attend boarding school and she reasonably decided there would be much more security from either boredom or loneliness with Trixy to lean upon.
Few letters and fewer home visits were advised by this, as by most boarding schools, during the students’ first month or two, so that those away from home for the first time might more promptly become inured to their new surroundings; so it happened Gloria had only received and written two letters from and to Jane. Now, Jane, the faithful, had for years stood sponsor for Gloria, whose mother had died when Gloria was but a tiny child. Jane kept house at Barbend, the original home of Gloria and her father, and when the young girl came into Sandford to remain with her Aunt Harriet while her father took a foreign commission from his firm, Jane Morgan went to visit her own sister, she who had so many children that the snapshot pictures frequently sent Jane were apt to be misleading in personalities. They all looked alike and seemed too many for the camera.