“Father says that when we try to pay back it hurts us the worst,” replied Hilary. “I’m not preaching, please, but such pranks take a lot of time and aren’t so very smart or funny in the end. Let’s try to keep out of them. If you could get hold of Isabel, Cathalina, you would do her a lot of good. She and Avalon just about worship you.” CHAPTER IX GOSSIP As the days went by, Cathalina became accustomed to her new surroundings and the school routine, with the stimulating life in the midst of much young companionship. Yet no one knew just what it cost her to overcome her timidity. She was, to be sure, not the only young girl at Greycliff who was learning lessons of self-reliance, and the very knowledge of that fact helped her. Pride, also, came to the rescue. She was not going to appear like a dunce, not she! And as confidence grew, she discovered that many even of the older girls, for all the superior years and wisdom for which she had given them credit, could not recite as correctly as she, nor cared, apparently, to use their brains in thinking things out. “Why, Helen,” she said one day to Helen Paget, as they came together from Randolph, where their Literature class had been reciting, “Victoria Parker did not even blush when she made that awful mistake today.” “O, she really hasn’t enough sense, Cathalina, to know how bad it was, and doesn’t care anyhow. She’s one of the ‘Simps.’ Her father sent her here, I heard, because she was so silly and he was afraid she might run away to be married.” “It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had not just been studying George Eliot. The way she rattled it off, that Adam Bede was an English monk and was called the venerable Bede!” “But you ought to hear her recite in French or Latin, Cathalina. She doesn’t think it needs to make sense and takes any meaning that she can find in the dictionary for the words and strings them together. We just nearly die when she recites. You can imagine what a fit Dr. Carver takes over her Latin recitations, and the French teacher has all she can do to keep her face straight sometimes.” “Who is the French teacher?—there are several of the teachers on the platform at Chapel that I don’t know yet.” “Madame Dumont. She is wonderful, a perfect dear! The girls work their heads off for her. She’s a native, you know, and goes over home every summer. But she’s terribly worried since the war started in August, you know. She had a son and other people in it, of course. You must meet her. She’d only be too delighted since you can talk with her.” “It would be wonderful for me, only I’m afraid of making mistakes. But what did you mean by ‘simps’?” “Can’t you guess?” “Simpletons?” “Yes. She and that queer girl that she is always with were rather snippy to Diane and me and called us the ‘Imps,’ so we sometimes call them the ‘S’Imps,’ with our crowd, of course.” “Victoria is quite pretty,” said Cathalina.