Poor Gladys really was to be pitied at that moment, for though she was a little goose to feel so, she really did feel that a disgrace had fallen upon her which death could hardly wipe out. And then the silence was broken by a little titter from the three girls, and Ida Hammond said sarcastically, “How nice!”
Janet looked from Gladys’s party-colored countenance to the amusement gleaming in the eyes of her friends, and saw that something was wrong, but what it could be she had not the faintest idea. And before anything worse could happen a voice behind her said: “Yes, isn’t that nice? Isn’t it lovely? Please introduce me to your cousin, Gladys.”
Janet turned and saw a girl who was in the class with her and Gwen. She was tall, not pretty, but distinguished looking, with that air of good breeding which is so definite, yet so indefinable—the look of one who for many generations had inherited good principles and right standards of living and taste.
“My cousin, Janet Howe, Miss Dorothy Schuyler,” murmured Gladys.
Dorothy put out her hand. “I am so glad to have you here, Janet,” she said. “I was so much interested in what you were saying. There aren’t many girls with enough affection for their fathers to study that they may help them, and few clever enough to do it, even if they do want to. Won’t you tell me about it?”
There was a determined look in the brown eyes that smiled kindly, in spite of it, on Jan, and she knew, though she did not know why, that she was being championed.
“There isn’t very much to tell,” she said slowly, responding in a puzzled way to the other’s cordiality. “My father is in the real-estate business out in the little place I came from—Crescendo. He has to deal a good deal with Germans, and he hasn’t as big a business as he would have in such a growing town if he weren’t working on a patent he wants to bring out. So he needs me—or I liked to think he did—to help him, and he needs some one to speak German, so I tried to combine the two. Like the man in Pickwick who wrote about Chinese metaphysics,” added Jan, with a sudden laugh, and the dimples that made her so irresistibly pretty coming in her cheeks.
Dorothy had a sense of humor, too, and she liked Dickens. She laughed, and put an arm affectionately over the stranger’s shoulder. “I think it is beautiful to find a girl of our age trying to do something loving and sensible like that,” she said heartily. “I hope you can teach me to be brave and unselfish. Wouldn’t you like to come over to that deep window-seat and see the view—it is fine from there—and tell me more about Crescendo? If Gladys can lend you to me a while?” she added interrogatively.
Gladys seemed to think that she could, and the two walked away, followed by glances by no means pleasant from the group they had left. In that first encounter were sown the seeds of future enmity, for the Hammonds and Flossie disliked Janet as much as they would naturally dislike one to whom they had been unkind, and who had thus been the means of making them appear badly in the eyes of Dorothy Schuyler.
When Gwen awakened from her day-dream to a consciousness of her neglect of Janet, she stared in amazement at the sight of her cousin chattering volubly to Dorothy, whose cheeks were red from laughing. Gwen drew a sigh of relief; she saw that Jan was happy, and she knew Dorothy was so innately well-bred that she would never misunderstand any confidences Jan chose to make, as would the other sort of girls.