For the first ten minutes our drive was enchanting. But presently the
chatter of the others became more personal, and on subjects of which I
knew nothing. Before we reached the academy, they had begun to whisper
now and then, and I felt a little embarrassed; but this feeling wore off
under the excitement of entering the noisy lecture-room, where we took
our places with a great deal of flourish, and where a circle of Mattie's
boy friends was soon around us. Kate Rivers sat on one side of me, and
Mattie on the other, and the two leaned across me, continually chatting
on things I did not understand, while the boys now and then spoke to me
with an easy tone, half jest, half, as it seemed to me, rude
familiarity.
Slowly it began to come upon me that these fine friends of Mattie's
never would be ladies and gentlemen. Fine as they were, much as they
talked of "fun" they had had and were going to have, I knew they were
unlike the simple-minded, refined young people I had been among in my
quiet country home; and then I began to wish I had not come.
I was ashamed of sitting there in Mattie's finery--of being teased about
"running away," of being asked if it wasn't "too jolly to escape the
dragon," as Bob and Mattie called our dear Miss Harding, and last, but
worst of all, glancing across the crowded hall, I saw in the distance
Philip and Laura Sydney. Then they had come! The voices of my new
friends buzzed in my ears, their loud laughter was dreadful for that
moment.
I shrank back, afraid to meet Laura's gentle gaze, ashamed to have
either her or Philip see me in my borrowed plumes, and with such a
company.