Greta threw her golden head back and laughed, displaying a double row of enviable pearls.
"But I've got to wait for all these things until Billy Keyse strikes pay-reef. Poor Billy! Hand over those chocolates, you greedy things!"
Somebody wanted to know how the package had been smuggled into the Convent. Those lay-Sisters were so sharp....
"They're perfect needles—Sister Tarsesias particularly, and Sister Tobias. But there's a new Emigration Jane among the housemaids. You've seen her—the sallow thing with the greasy light-coloured fringe in curlers, who walks flat-footed like a wader on the mud. I keep expecting to hear her quack.... Well, Billy got hold of her. She didn't know my name, being new, but she recognised me by Billy's description, and sympathised with him, having a young man herself, who doesn't speak a word of English, except 'damn' and 'Three of Scotch, please.' I've promised to translate her letters; he writes them in the Taal. And Billy gave her two dollars, and I've given her a hat. It's the big red one mother brought back from Paris—she paid a hundred francs for it at the Maison Cluny—and Emigration Jane thinks, though it's a bit too quiet for her taste, it'll do her a fair old treat when she trims it up with a bit more colour and one or two 'imitation ostridge' tips.... I'd give another hundred francs for the Maison Cluny modiste to hear." Again the birdlike laugh rang out. "Now you know everything there is in the letter, girls, except the bit of poetry at the end, which only my most intimate friends may be permitted to read. Lynette Mildare!"
Lynette, bending over a separate table-desk in the light of the north window of the long deal match-boarded class-room, looked up from her work of tooling leather, the delicate steel instrument in her hand, a little gilding-brush between her white teeth, a little fold of concentrated attention between her slender brown eyebrows.
"Yes. Did you want anything?"
Greta jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates to dissolve among the White Class, and came over, threading her way between the long rows of desk-stalls.
"Of course I want something."
"What is it?" asked Lynette, laying down the little tool.
"What everyone has a right to expect from the person who is her dearest friend—sympathy," said Greta, jumping up and sitting on the corner of the desk, and biting the thick end of her long flaxen pigtail.