“Look here, Olive, I want to ask Gerry a question, if it won’t hurt your feelings too much, and while Miss Hunt is here with us it seems to me the best time to ask it. Gerry, of course we have known for some time that there has been some gossip about Olive going the rounds of the school, but we have never known who started it nor just what the story is. Would you mind telling us?”
Instead of answering Gerry hesitated, her homely, kindly face showing nervousness and discomfort.
“Is the story just that Olive does not know who her parents are and that we ranch girls found her several years ago with an Indian woman and that she may be of part Indian blood?” Jean continued inexorably.
Gerry nodded her head. “Yes, and the story came originally through the Harmons, I believe, though they meant no harm.”
“Is that all the tale or has anything else been added?” her questioner continued. And Gerry answered with her eyes on her saucer, “Yes, that is all.”
“Then please tell every girl at Primrose Hall that what they have heard is perfectly true,” Jean blazed, although she was trying to speak calmly. “I can see now that we have made a mistake; it would have been better if we had been perfectly candid about Olive’s past from the first. There never has been a minute when we would have minded telling it, if any one of the girls had come and asked us, but lately I have thought that some extra story must have been hatched up about poor Olive and joined to the true one, for I simply couldn’t believe that any human beings could be so horrid and so stupid as the Primrose Hall girls have been to Olive, unless they had been told something perfectly dreadful about her. Well, I don’t think I care a snap about being class president of such a set of girls,” Jean added impolitely, forgetting one of her guests. “Olive Ralston, I don’t believe you are any more an Indian than I am, but I want to say just this one more thing and then I positively promise to stop talking: For my part I would rather have good red Indian blood in my veins than the kind of thin white blood that must run in the veins of such a horrid set of snobs. Gerry, dear, I do beg your pardon and of course I don’t mean you, but if I hadn’t been allowed to speak this out loud, I should certainly have exploded.”
Gerry’s head dropped. “Well, perhaps I have belonged to the snobs, too, Jean,” she answered truthfully, “but if Olive will forgive me and make up, perhaps some day we may be friends.”
Slowly the sitting-room door now opened and a languid figure, clothed in a marvelous dressing gown of pale blue silk and lace, with yellow hair piled high on its head, entered the room. “What on earth is Jean preaching about?” the voice of no other person than the youngest Miss Ralston inquired. “I have just been across the hall with Mollie and Lucy Johnson and I declare she has been talking steadily for an hour.”
Jessica Hunt made some laughing explanation, but Olive and Jean could only stare in amazement at Frieda. Where on earth had she gotten so marvelous a kimono? It really looked like a stage affair. But at this instant, beholding the violets, Frieda, forgetting her grown-up manner for a moment, jumped at them. “Aren’t they too beau-ti-ful?” she said like the small girl who once had taken care of her own violet beds at The Rainbow Lodge.