Olive colored, but did not reply at once.
“I do wish Jack were here,” Jean continued, “for she would have some influence with you and not let you be so pokey and unfriendly. I am sure I have tried in vain to stir you up and now I think I’ll write Jack and Ruth how you are behaving. Really, you are spoiling Frieda’s and my good times at school by being so stiff and touchy.” And Jean, knowing that Olive did not yet understand how her failure to be invited into either sorority was influencing her chance for the class election, yet had the grace to turn her face away.
For Olive had grown white. “Please don’t write to Jack or Ruth, Jean,” she asked quietly, “I do not wish them to know I am not a success at school and if you tell them that no one here likes me they will then know that I am unhappy and will be worried, and Jack must not have any worry now. It isn’t that I don’t try to make the girls like me. You are mistaken if you think I don’t try; but oh, what is the matter with me, Jean, that makes me so unpopular?”
In an instant Jean’s arms were about Olive and she was kissing her warmly. “Don’t be a goose, dear, there is nothing the matter with you and you are not unpopular really; it is just some horrid, silly mistake. Now promise me that to-night you won’t be frightened and you will be friendly with everybody.” In this instant Jean made up her mind that in some unexplainable way Olive must be standing in her own light or else her classmates must see how charming she was.
Olive promised with a quaking heart, knowing that many eyes would soon be upon her to-night, including Miss Winthrop’s, who would be noticing her unpopularity. And would she know a single guest at the dance?
Frieda and Mollie Johnson had already disappeared, so that Jean and Olive went down to the big reception rooms together, holding each other’s hands like little girls.
CHAPTER VII
CINDERELLA
To Miss Katherine Winthrop’s credit it must be stated that she desired her students at Primrose Hall to grow into something more useful than mere society women. Her ambition was to have them fill many important positions in the modern world now offering such big opportunities to clever women. Miss Winthrop was herself an unusually clever woman, cold perhaps and not sympathetic with most of her girls, but just always and interested in their welfare. But then none of her girls knew the story of her youth nor realized that the last life she had ever expected for herself in her rich and brilliant girlhood was that of a mistress of a fashionable boarding school. Years before, Katherine Winthrop had been the belle and beauty of the countryside, a toast in New York City and in the homes of the old Dutch and English families along the Hudson River, until she had let her pride spoil the one romance of her life. By and by, when her father died and her family fortune disappeared, she had then opened up her old home as a girls’ boarding school and her aristocratic connections and old name immediately made Primrose Hall both fashionable and popular, until now its mere name lent its students an assured social prestige. Nevertheless, Miss Winthrop wished her school to be something more than fashionable. Indeed, this thought had been in her mind when she had chosen the ranch girls for her pupils from among a list of fifty or more applicants whom she had been obliged to refuse. There was little in the life of her school which she did not see and understand, and now her hope was that Jean and Olive and Frieda, with their freedom from snobbery, their simplicity and broader way of looking at things, would bring the element most needed into their mere money-loving and conventional eastern atmosphere. Though no one had mentioned it to her, she had already observed Jean’s great popularity with her classmates, Frieda’s good time among the younger girls and Olive’s failure to make friends. What was the trouble with this third ranch girl?
Although Miss Winthrop had been particularly busy for the past month in getting her school into good working order, she had not forgotten the peculiar emotion that Olive had awakened in her at their first meeting. Because the child was unusual in her manner and appearance was scarcely a sufficient reason for the universal prejudice against her, and to-night, at the first dance of the school season, Miss Winthrop had determined to watch Olive closely and find out for herself wherein lay the difficulty. Jessica Hunt was receiving with Miss Winthrop to-night and had also wondered how Olive would stand the ordeal of their first evening entertainment. For the dances at Primrose Hall were not informal, it being a part of the principal’s idea that they should train her girls for social life in any part of the world where in later years circumstances might chance to take them.
Miss Winthrop, her teachers and students, always appeared in full evening dress at these entertainments, and this evening Miss Winthrop wore a plain black velvet gown with a small diamond star at her throat, a piece of jewelry for which she had a peculiar affection. Jessica Hunt, who was standing next her, was in pure white, so that her blue eyes and the bronze-gold of her hair (so like Jack’s, Olive had thought) made a striking contrast with the darker, sterner beauty of the older woman. Though there were a dozen or more of the Primrose Hall girls grouped about the two women when Jean and Olive entered the reception room together, both of them immediately saw and watched them as they came slowly forward.