No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.’”
Then Gerry, marching over with an exaggerated, swashbuckling stride toward Winifred, smote her on the shoulder with more friendliness than she had shown her in many weeks. “Come, Winifred, what is the use of our worrying now? I believe I need this prize money quite as much as you do, since my father has just made some unfortunate investments and may not be able to let me come back to old Primrose Hall to graduate next year. And of course we know this prize would mean our tuition. But we must take what comes with a good grace, for you and Olive and I have an equally fair chance with our speeches to-day. So if Olive wins we ought not to fuss, for I can perfectly well understand how she wants the glory of winning and not the prize itself. She told me that she had been working for this prize ever since she first came to Primrose Hall in order to show her beloved Jack Ralston how much she had appreciated the opportunities she had given her.”
In reply Winifred merely shrugged her shoulders scornfully, but at the same instant, a bell sounding out on the lawn and a great clapping of hands, she again fell to studying the paper in her hand. “Good gracious, there is someone’s speech just ending!” she exclaimed, “so our turns will come soon.”
And Gerry, even though she was sure of being letter perfect in Rosalind’s saucy reply to Orlando: “No, no, Orlando, men are April when they woo, December when they wed,” opened her “As You Like It” and began once more to read over her part.
So five, ten, fifteen minutes went by and then Jessica Hunt’s voice was heard outside in the hall: “Where are my Shakespeare heroines?” she demanded. “Gerry, Winifred, please put your long coats around you and come on downstairs now. The coast is clear and it is almost time for your speeches. I will tell Olive.”
Winifred had indeed been right: no commencement day at Primrose Hall had ever been so beautiful as this one and never before had one called forth so many guests.
Built as like as possible to an old Greek outdoor theatre, a stage had been erected at the edge of a grove of trees not many yards from the great house and a kind of covered arbor temporarily arranged so that the girls who took part in the commencement exercises might pass from the house to the stage without being seen by the audience. The stage had no curtain and only the sky for a canopy, a rarely blue sky with the white clouds that melt before the deeper warmth of June. On either side were piled great branches of trees freshly brought in from the woods, delicately green with the early leaves of spring, and the floor of the stage was strewn with wild-flowers, buttercups, violets and daisies.
In the yard facing the pretty impromptu theatre the audience was seated, perhaps two hundred persons, so that any girl making her first public appearance before it might reasonably be frightened. Perhaps it was the beauty of the day, perhaps the novelty of Miss Winthrop’s stage arrangements, for surely no audience had ever appeared more enthusiastic than hers, and as each girl had stepped forth on the stage, apparently entering from the heart of a woods on to a carpet of flowers, the applause and interest had increased.