“What a trump you are, Jan,” said Gwen, stopping short to gaze admiringly at her cousin. “You never bear the least grudge. Glad has been perfectly nasty to you often, and now she’s in trouble you’d do anything to pull her through!”
Jan colored. “I’m not a saint, Gwen,” she said. “I don’t enjoy being snubbed, but I think it’s mean and low to try to get square with people. If you can’t fight a thing out at the time, drop it, I say. I just despise people who keep up and keep up and dwell on fusses—even if they were in the right in the first place that puts them in the wrong, to my way of thinking. I don’t believe that’s goodness in me. I do so hate such petty ways of quarreling. I’d feel low and ill-bred if I remembered rows and waited a chance to get square. However, as to Gladys, I don’t want to get square with her. I’ve been sorry she didn’t like me, but I don’t feel any spite toward her. Besides, she’s my cousin, my blessed mother’s own niece, and your sister, and Syd’s sister, and the sister of all of you, and it would be a queer thing if I wouldn’t stand by my own cousin.”
Gwen, remembering how she had scolded Gladys for not standing by this very “own cousin” of hers, still thought it fine in Jan to be so generous, but she continued her way without further expression of that opinion, resuming her animated discussion of Gladys’s wrongs.
That afternoon Gwen and Jan went to see the Misses Larned in the freedom of hours out of school. They intended firmly, though respectfully to decline to appear in the play if their teachers persisted in refusing to allow Gladys opportunity of clearing herself of whatever she might be accused.
Jan’s part was insignificant, for she was not suspected of histrionic ability, nor was her experience in acting in the barn in distant Crescendo known to “the Hydra’s” heads, but Gwen was a loss which threatened the play with disaster, and Miss Larned—the elder and the only one whom the girls found at home—stooped from her dignified height to expostulate with her.
“It is quite natural and in one sense laudable that you should espouse Gladys’s cause, Gwendoline,” she said. “But I assure you, you are mistaken in so doing. We are justified in making the change that has been made, and we are acting kindly in making it with no complaint of Gladys—merely making it. Gladys understands perfectly why it is done, and you should trust us—trust me, in fact—sufficiently to assume that I am acting wisely.”
“Miss Larned,” said Gwen, trying to control the wrath this stately speech aroused, but betraying it in her heightened color, “you think you are acting wisely, but I think—we all think—you are dreadfully mistaken. As to Gladys’s knowing what all this is about, I was with her when she solemnly told you that she did not know. Gladys has plenty of faults, but in all the fourteen years of her life I never knew her to tell an untruth if you asked her anything straight out, as you did this morning. When Gladys says she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. And if it comes to trusting any one, I must trust my own sister’s word when I know I can. If Gladys was untruthful I would be fair enough to own it—to myself, anyway—and keep still. But lying is not a Graham fault, and I know Gladys is in the dark about what makes you take her part from her. And I want to ask you if you think it is fair to condemn any one without a hearing?”
“I can not allow you to question my judgment, Gwendoline,” said Miss Larned. “The matter is closed.”
“Very well. Then I must ask to be excused from taking any part in the play, Miss Larned,” said Gwen rising, with hardly less dignity than Miss Larned herself.
“Gwendoline, you will put us to serious inconvenience. There is no one in the school competent to act the part assigned you save yourself,” said Miss Larned. “You should have the success of the play, the honor of your school, when strangers will come to witness your efforts, sufficiently at heart to sacrifice something for it.”