A GREAT DEAL TO LEARN
Molly Granger possessed at least one talent besides the ability to
extract fun out of most things. She could draw quite remarkably for a
girl who had had so little instruction; and made many really clever
cartoons in black and white.
Over her dressing-table was a long study in feline humor; as Beth
called it when she first observed the piece, “a yard of cats.”
“Isn’t it cute?” she cried. “You never did it?”
“Yes, I did. From life,” Molly said, smiling at the row of kittens
tenderly.
“From _life_? Nonsense! How could you get cats to pose for you? And
they are too, too funnily human!”
“Didn’t get the cats to pose. But my aunts did. I flatter myself I have
hit off the characteristics of the dears.”
“Your aunts?” gasped Beth, horrified.
“Yes, my dear. All seven of them.”
“There are seven of the cats,” admitted Beth, weakly. “But you never
deliberately caricatured your aunts like that?”
“They’re not caricatures. My aunts are regular tabbies, anyway; they
don’t mind. They begin to look upon my talent for drawing cats as a
‘gift.’ You see, Bethesda,” said Molly, laughing again now, “I can draw
cats, and I can’t draw folks. If I ever attempt your portrait, you’ll
have to appear as a cat. Whatever artistic talent I have, I’ll never be
a portrait painter. So I told the aunts I wanted to draw them in black
and white, and they all sat for me.”
Beth was as much amazed as she was amused.
“The grave looking cat at the end, with spectacles and a book, is Aunt
Celia; the next with the knitting and goloshes on her feet is Aunt
Catherine. She always either wears overshoes or carries them. Auntie
Cora is the cute little blue kitten with the fan.
“Aunt Carrie stands there in her wedding finery--she still has hopes.
She is engaged to a sea captain who comes home for three weeks about
once in three years. Doesn’t she look too sweet for anything? Aunt
Charlotte is the sly, plump one--you _know_ she’s just lapped up all
the cream. Aunt Charlotte manages to get the best of everything.
“Aunt Cassie is the one in furs and mittens; she’s always cold. I
believe she’d get chilblains in July. On the end is Aunt Cyril--you can
see she is an aristocrat, the dear! I’m quite proud of my aunties--but
nobody ever called them a yard of cats before,” and Molly giggled.
Beth Baldwin’s introduction to Rivercliff School was not all fun
and frolic. On Monday came lessons--the beginning of the fall and
winter semester. Miss Hammersly and her teachers were quite firm in
their intention of making the students of Rivercliff work. And few of
them--lazy or otherwise--cared to have a monthly report go home, across
which was printed “defective.”
Miss Hammersly’s idea was that girls came to her to study--and for no
other reason. This was not a boarding school where the pupils could
work or not, as they pleased. “Ours is not an institution for the
encouragement of girls lacking in gray-matter,” Miss Hammersly was wont
to say. “I am very sorry for the defectives; but three such reports
send them home.”
Beth found that the working hours of the school were fully occupied,
and that the recreation hours were not long enough for any of the
students to get very deeply into mischief.
Even jolly Molly had to repress her super-abundant spirits; or rather,
after being under the ministrations of the instructors of Rivercliff
School all day, by supper time the most spirited girl in the school was
subdued.
“Goodness!” confessed Molly to her chum, coming wearily into Number
Eighty and dropping an armful of books on Beth’s study table, “I
feel like a wornout dishcloth that’s been drawn sixty times through
a knothole! Miss Carroll has just about finished me this time, Beth
Baldwin. If I don’t get up to-morrow morning, just write my seven
aunties that I died in a good cause--in an attempt to acquire all the
knowledge in the world within an infinitesimal length of time.”
“Oh, Molly! it’s not so bad as all that,” Beth said, laughing, though
rather ruefully, for she found the system followed at Rivercliff
entirely different from that at the Hudsonvale high school. Larry
had been right. Three years at this establishment--if she could keep
up--would put her a long lap ahead in education.
Her own end of the table was piled high with books, for the two chums
studied each evening together--and preferably in Number Eighty.
Eighty-one was too apt to be the Mecca of girls who desired to scamp
their work and barely get through on the monthly reports “by the skin
of their teeth.”
“Which is a perfectly proper expression, and _not_ slang, Beth Baldwin,
no matter what Miss Carroll may say,” Molly declared. “Who was it said
it--Job or the psalmist?”
“That is your question--you answer it,” replied Beth. “But what do you
make out of this awful passage Miss Felice has given us to construe?
It’s a heart-breaker, isn’t it?”
They set to work. They were not the only studious girls on the
corridor; but there was a good deal of noise outside, and Beth closed
the door to shut some of it out. Having retired to Number Eighty, Molly
hoped her old friends would not annoy her.
“I am determined to delight the aunts this year,” Molly said. “I’ve
told them I have a new chum and that she is studious. Maybe it’s
catching.”
This evening was within the first fortnight of the term. Naturally,
Beth had not made many friends as yet. The girl who attends strictly
to her lessons in a boarding school is slower in making friendships
than she who is careless of her standing on the reports. So the gay
ones were not apt to come and pound on the door of Number Eighty for
admittance.
Not that Beth did not take plenty of recreation. Indeed, that was
compulsory to a certain extent. There was a physical instructor and
a splendid gymnasium--the latter a handsome building, the gift of a
wealthy graduate of Miss Hammersly’s establishment.
There was a splendid athletic field, too, with a cinder track, courts
for basket-ball and tennis; and at the foot of the bluff, which was
reached in the school wagonette, was a boathouse with a number of two,
four, and eight-oared shells, as well as canoes and a power launch of
some size.
Nothing was neglected that would add to the physical development, as
well as the mental well-being, of the girls. Miss Hammersly did not
graduate weaklings in any particular.
Save Maude Grimshaw, such girls as had spoken to Beth had been
kind. But except Molly and a few of her intimate friends, nobody at
Rivercliff had paid very much attention to her. She had been popular in
Hudsonvale, and she missed Mary Devine and her other schoolmates who
had deferred to her there.
She did not even have an opportunity of talking with Cynthia Fogg, the
strange girl who had come up to Rivercliff with her on the steamboat.
She saw Cynthia now and then, going about her duties. She waited at
a neighboring table to Beth’s in the dining-room. But there could be
no communication of any extended character between the “young lady
students” and the maids employed at the school. Madam Hammersly’s eye
was too sharp.
This night, while Beth and Molly were deeply engaged in their books,
both suddenly looked up to see an unexpected figure standing in the
doorway of the passage into Molly’s room. It was that of a girl in
a kimono with a red bag over her head, masking her completely, for
there were only two little holes in the bag to see through. It was a
startling apparition, and Molly exclaimed:
“Cracky-me! How you scared us! Go away--do!”
The girl behind the mask of turkey-red giggled. Then she stalked
forward and placed two folded red bags, like her own, on the study
table.
“Number Sixty-two. Ten-thirty,” she said, in a sepulchral voice, and
immediately marched out again by the way she had come.
“Well!” gasped Beth.
But Molly began to giggle now. “It’s just awful--this trying to be
a ‘grind.’ My poor, poor Bethesda! your chum’s former reputation is
against our ever being the twin Minervas of Rivercliff School.”
“But what does this mean?” demanded Beth, trying on one of the bags.
“Kimono party--sometimes called red-head party. You can see what the
bags are for. Unless you are familiar with the kimonos of the whole
school, you can’t be sure of who is at the party--save the legal
occupant of the room in which the party is held. And sometimes the
girls exchange kimonos. So that helps.”
“Helps! How?”
“Why, if we are caught, and can run, the teacher or monitor who catches
us can’t see who we are with the bags over our heads. And those who are
captured can’t tell on the rest, for everybody’s masked and we can’t be
sure. See?”
“Are you going to-night?” Beth asked.
“What number did she say?” rejoined Molly.
“Sixty-two.”
“Let’s! That’s Mamie Dunn’s,” cried Beth.
“Aren’t there two Sixty-twos?”
“Oh, the kimono parties have to be wing affairs. Guests can’t slip over
from one wing to the other. They have to be localized.”
“Why?” asked the curious Beth.
“Why, there’s always somebody on watch at the top of the main flight of
stairs--and there’s no other way to go from wing to wing than by that
cross-corridor.”
“On watch all night, do you mean?”
“Sure. For fire protection; likewise if anybody should be taken sick in
the night.”
“I suppose,” said Beth, reflectively, “that these after-hours parties
are against the rules of the school?”
“I suppose they are,” admitted Molly, with serious mouth but twinkling
eyes; “but I never really asked.”
Beth laughed. “Did you ever get caught at one of these parties?”
“Never mind about that! We’ll go to-night. All work and no play makes
Jill just as dull as her brother.”
“We’ll do our tasks first, dear,” said Beth.
She was not a prude; but she felt herself in honor bound to keep up
with all her lessons. She had been at Rivercliff long enough to know
that she could not earn her diploma in any easy way. To fall back one
recitation would mean hard effort to make it up. There were no delays
for the slow and inattentive under Miss Hammersly.
Beth, of course, had written home several times. She had told the
home folk of all the interesting things she had encountered thus far
in her school life, and about her teachers and the students as she
had met them with the one exception of Maude Grimshaw. She had not
mentioned that haughty and purse-proud girl. Beth hoped she would never
be obliged to come in contact with Maude again. She thought that, by
letting her unpleasant neighbor strictly alone, Maude would let her
alone.
She was yet to learn the fallacy of this belief--as well as much else
that Beth could never have learned anywhere but at Rivercliff School.