“Dear me! I wish now we hadn’t been so silly, Dorothy, and done all those crazy things. Then we could have roomed together this year.”
“I know. Maybe ’twas foolish, but I’ll never forget them. Especially the time when we dropped the pumpkin pie before Miss Green’s door.” They both laughed. “And, anyway, Priscilla, with Greenie in The Hermitage, if we’d been saints, we couldn’t have roomed together. She thinks we’re both heathen, and I worse than you; and just because she does think I’m so bad, I feel like being just as bad as I can be. I wish Miss Wallace would have the cottage alone this year. She’s such a darling! I just adore her! I’d scrub floors for her! My dear, she wrote me the most divine letter this summer! It absolutely thrilled me, and I was good for a week afterward!”
Virginia looked out of the window amused. What queer ways of saying things! She had never heard a letter called “divine” before; nor had she realized that scrubbing floors and adoring some one were harmonious occupations. She listened again. Priscilla was talking this time.
“I adore Miss Wallace, too,” she said. “She makes you want to be fine just by never talking about it. I wish I could like poor Miss Green—she seems so sort of left out some way—but she just goes at you the wrong way. Mother and daddy think she must be splendid because she enforces rules, and they say we’re prejudiced; but I don’t think they understand. It isn’t enforcing the rules; it’s the way she has of doing it.”
Dorothy acquiesced. “I suppose we’ll have to make the best of her if she’s there. Miss Wallace’s being there, too, will make it better. I’m wondering whom I’ll draw for a room-mate. Do you know who’s yours?”
“No, Miss King wrote mother and said she’d selected a wholly desirable one for me. I do hope she doesn’t chew gum, or want fish-nets up, or like to borrow.”
Virginia recalled Miss King’s words to her grandmother—“a wholly desirable girl ”—but then that was just a form of expression. There was no reason to believe, much as she would like to hope, that Priscilla was to be her room-mate. At all events, if such a thing by any possibility should come to pass, she was glad she did not chew gum. As to fish-nets, she had never heard of one in a room, and as for borrowing, she had never had any one in her life from whom she might borrow.
At that moment she saw the girls looking at her. Perhaps they had suspected that she, too, was a St. Helen’s girl. They whispered one to the other and exchanged glances, while Virginia, a little embarrassed, looked out of the window. She only hoped they liked her half as much as she liked them. They began to talk again.
“My dear,” this from the extravagant Dorothy, “when you see my Navajo rug, your eyes will leave your head for a week! It’s positively heavenly! Daddy had it sent from California. Whoever my room-mate is, she ought to be grateful for having that on the floor. It makes up for me.”
“I won’t hope for a Navajo just so long as I get some one I’ll like.”