“Oh, no! I was just thinking how lovely the glint of the gold lettering on each dark book makes the room seem. If only there was a dark polished floor to reflect the chair and table legs, the room would be wonderful! But this large carpet spoils that effect!” Nolla exclaimed impetuously.
Mrs. Wellington straightened her spine and looked in hurt amazement at this inexperienced miss who babbled like an expert decorator. No one had ever criticised that carpet rug before!
Anne saw the look and comprehended at once, so she dropped oil on the troubled waters. “Oh, Nolla! you are so carried away with your hobby of studying decorating that you needs must practise it and criticise everywhere. Now, I’m sure, Mrs. Wellington never would have dreamed of your ambition had you not showed it so plainly in your words just now.”
Eleanor understood Anne’s motive in speaking thus, and smiled benignly. Polly was still trying to grasp the handle to Anne’s remark when the lady of the house led them forth again.
“Here are a number of smaller rooms where girls may sit and read or study in the evening. And now we will go up to the class rooms.”
If Eleanor and Polly had been able to find flaws with the lack of taste shown in the furnishings of the first-floor, they could not detect the slightest item missing in the equipment and furnishing of the different school rooms. Every known modern device and object for the comfort, health and help of scholars, were in evidence. Anne smiled with pleasure as she looked around.
“It will be a delight to teach in such a room as this, Mrs. Wellington; and I’m sure the scholars appreciate all you do for them.”
“No, that is the strange part of it, Miss Stewart. The girls who come here seldom think of all I do for them in providing these rooms. They take it as a matter of course that I should spend so much money in keeping everything as I do, while my competitors ask higher rates and spend less;” the lady looked troubled over it.
“Now I have a friend down on Seventy-second street, who has conducted a most exclusive school for years; but she will not spend a cent in these ideal accommodations yet she gets higher prices than I do. And her waiting list of well-known names is endless. I only have a list of about a dozen applicants and they are not daughters of millionaires, either.”
“Perhaps,” Anne remarked kindly, “the girls you graduate make something of themselves in life, whereas those other society girls merely skim over lessons and never know how to spell their own names.”