Margaret nodded. Jean was not so sure that she cared to have Olive’s difficulties at school discussed before Cecil Belknap, whom she did not yet thoroughly like, but as Margaret’s guest she did not like to protest.
Gerry then leaned across the table toward the ranch girls with her teaspoon poised in the air.
“Look here, Jean, Frieda, everybody, it is just like this. You know that when the three ranch girls came to Primrose Hall most of us liked two of the three girls right from the first, after a few of their western peculiarities had rubbed up against our eastern ones. But with the third girl, with Olive—well, it was different. In the first place, Olive was shy and did not look exactly like the rest of us (she is much prettier than I am, for example); in the second place, the story was circulated about among the girls that Olive was part Indian, the daughter of a dreadfully ignorant Indian woman from whom she had run away and that now she was trying to pretend that she was no relation to her own mother. Of course, had any one of us ever looked at Olive very hard we must have known that this story was an untruth, or else only a half truth, which is the worst kind of a lie. But we were too prejudiced and Olive too shy to stand up for herself and—oh, what is the use of my going into this horrid part of my story when I want to come to the fairy tale at the end! After a while some of us girls did begin to see a little further than the end of our noses and to suspect that a girl as clever as Olive in her studies, as lovely in disposition and as refined and gentle in her manner, could hardly be what we had believed her, simply couldn’t. And now I want to say just one thing in excuse for myself. I did know that Olive was a lady and more than a lady, a trump, before I learned that she was not an Indian girl, but a heroine,” and here Gerry paused an instant to sigh and to get her breath in order to continue to express her romantic delight in the change of the stranger girl’s fortune.
Hurriedly, however, Margaret Belknap now seized this moment’s respite.
“I knew that Olive was charming too,” she interposed, “and I did try to be nicer to her before I went away for the Christmas holidays, intending on my return to ask her to overlook the past and be friends. I suppose there were other girls in our class who felt the same way and had this same intention?”
As Margaret paused four or five other voices answered: “There certainly were,” before she went on. “Yes, I know. But after we got back from our holidays it was then too late to make Olive believe in our good intentions, because in that short time things had so changed for her that she had become more interesting than any of the rest of us. You can see, Jean and Frieda, just what we have been up against?” (The well-broughtup Margaret was not conscious of using slang at this moment and only her brother smiled at her.) “If our Junior class had then rushed up at once to Olive and apologized to her, after we had learned of what had befallen her, why we did not believe that she would care very much for such a belated repentance. So for months now we have been trying to think of some pretty and tactful way to show our real feeling toward her and now we hope we have at last hit upon the right plan.”
“Do let me tell the rest, Margaret, you have talked such a long time,” and though a laugh went all around the table at her expense, Gerry again burst forth: “Everybody here knows that we are to have our school finals now in a short time and see the Seniors graduate and the Juniors, who are trying for the Shakespeare prize, give their recitations before the committee specially chosen to pass on them? Then of course we have luncheon and afterwards a dance on the lawn with all our guests at the commencement present. But there is one thing that perhaps you two ranch girls don’t know and that is that we always choose one of the Primrose Hall girls as our Queen for commencement day. Of course she must be selected from among the entire school, not from any one class; but Margaret and some of the other Juniors and I have been talking things over with the Seniors and they say it is our turn to have the Queen and that they are willing to—you know what we want to do, don’t you, Jean and Frieda?”
Jean bowed her head showing that she understood, but Frieda still appeared mystified.
“I think it would be a beautiful thing for you girls to do, if you really wish to do it,” Jean answered a bit huskily, although she was trying not to show any special emotion before Cecil Belknap, who had been watching her pretty closely all afternoon through his same hateful pair of eyeglasses.
“Beautiful to do what?” Frieda now demanded, turning first toward Mollie and then toward Lucy Johnson for the explanation of this everlasting preamble of Gerry’s and Margaret’s.