Boarding school students -- Juvenile fiction; Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction; Teenage girls -- Fiction
“His dear old straight shoulders!” she said, for there was only the
squirrel to hear; and in spite of her determination the tears would
come. With a sob she collapsed into the rustic seat and was ready for a
good cry. But suddenly she gathered herself together, mopped away the
tears and stood up, as straight as her father. “No, I will not! It
always makes me sick to cry! I’ll see if I can not show a little nerve
for once. That is what Father’s military salute meant. He was saying to
me, ‘Remember Martin Van Buskirk and the rest of your Revolutionary
ancestors, little daughter of the Revolution!’ I’m a goose! I’m past
fourteen years old and I’ve been away from home before, and I guess if I
wanted to go home awfully I could—but I’m going to _stay_!”
So the descendant of Martin Van Buskirk and Captain Hart walked as
firmly and briskly as her father, up the walk, the front steps and the
stairs to her own rooms, where she looked around to see what was to be
done. “As Phil says, ‘Here goes!’” she remarked to herself, throwing
back the top of a trunk; for before her father left, Cathalina’s trunks
had been sent up and stood unlocked and unstrapped in the hall by the
door.
“I wish my roommate were here,” she thought; “still, perhaps it will be
less confusing if I get my things put away first. And perhaps she’ll be
homesick, too, poor thing, and I can have a decent looking place for
her. Dear me! This does not look much like home! Such teeny rooms, and
only one dresser.” But thinking of some one else as homesick as herself
helped brace poor little Cathalina. She shook out her pretty, simple
frocks and hung them on one side of the large closet which the girls
were to share.
“O, dear, I wish I had Etta,” she sighed; for by the time the dresser
and wraps were hung up and the hats on the shelf, she was tired with the
trips from trunks to closet. But she kept on, nevertheless, and spread
on the table a pretty embroidered runner that Ann Maria had made for
her, and carried there by armfuls books and boxes of finery.
“Can’t put anything in the bureau drawers, I suppose, until we divide
them. I’m going to buy a big chiffonier, for I don’t see how we are ever
going to get along. I wish that steamer trunk could have been brought
in. I wonder why they won’t allow trunks in the rooms. It wouldn’t have
done any good if I had brought the wardrobe trunk I wanted.”
At last the trunks were emptied and all that was to go in the bureau
drawers arranged in neat piles on one of the beds. She was standing and
considering the windows, bare of curtains, when cheerful sounds drew her
over to lean out and see what was going on. Girls were climbing out of
one automobile. Another was rounding the curve, ready to stop as soon as
the first should move on, and a third was entering the drive. Two
express wagons and a motor truck, piled high with trunks, went rattling
to the rear of Greycliff Hall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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