Janet wandered on alone, feeling very shy and strange, among the chattering crowd eating cake and candy instead of better luncheons, and all eying her curiously as she passed.
She was bearing down toward the younger children—her refuge here, as at her uncle’s—when the Hammonds and Flossie Gilsey stopped her.
“Have you forgotten us already, Miss Howe?” called Daisy Hammond.
“No, indeed,” responded Janet, trying to speak easily and cordially. “But please don’t say Miss Howe. It seems so funny among girls like us; my name is Janet.”
“Thanks; it is awfully good of you to let us be intimate right away, and waive all ceremony. Generally we have to wait to use first names,” said Daisy, with an inflection that told Jan, unused as she was to polite disagreeables, that the speech was not meant at its face value. “I heard that your cousin Syd—isn’t he too handsome?—had given you such a nice, funny nickname.”
“Yes; Miss Lochinvar. That’s because I ‘came out of the West,’ you see,” said Janet, instinctively seizing her foe by the horns, so to speak. “It was bright of him, but only too flattering. I don’t expect to make a clean sweep of everything, like Young Lochinvar.” But as she laughed Jan’s heart sank. She was not used to this sort of bad temper, and she hated herself for meeting it while she felt forced to do so; she understood “getting mad,” but not petty spite. And all the while she was saying to herself, “Gladys told them; Gladys has been making game of me.”
But she had crippled her adversary; Daisy did not know how to meet this view of the case, and she glanced slyly at Gladys, who shrugged her shoulders.
“How well you speak German, Miss—Janet!” said Flossie Gilsey. “Isn’t it queer you know it so well, and don’t know French?”
“Not at all queer,” said Janet simply. “I hadn’t much chance to learn French, but there are lots of Germans in Crescendo. Besides, I like it better than French, I’m certain. But the real reason why I know it is because I worked hard to learn it. I meant to be able to speak it; I wanted to be fit to help papa in his office.”
A short silence fell on the little group at this shocking remark, during which Gladys turned a succession of alarming colors, and longed to go into hysterics or choke her cousin—probably both in rapid sequence. Janet Howe, her father’s sister’s child, staying at her house that winter, and brought by her and Gwen to this exclusive school, to announce—shamelessly, brazenly, to announce—that her ambition was to be a clerk in her father’s office, and that for this purpose she had learned German!