The path of the manager of a fashionable school is by no means an easy one. It is, in fact, as Miss Thompson had found, more difficult than the famous eye of the needle. For if she were so scrupulous as to bar out all the daughters of new wealth, she was in danger of lacking that material support without which Herndon Hall could not be maintained. And if she admitted too freely rich "Western girls" whose parents were "nobodies," but were keenly anxious to have their daughters become "somebodies," she was in danger of watering her wine to the point where it would lose all its potency. A constant equilibrium between the good-family class and the merely rich must be maintained if the school was to preserve its position. And so it can be understood why the proprietor and the teachers of Herndon Hall carefully scrutinized Adelle on her first appearance. Would she merely water their precious wine? If so she must be very rich, indeed, to compensate for her diluting presence. Miss Thompson had accepted her on the strength of President West's personal letter, and it did not take her long to discover that she had made a grave mistake. Adelle was all water! She folded up her napkin at dinner in the thrifty manner of the Church Street house. She ate her soup from the point of her spoon, and the wrong spoon, and she wore her one dress from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed. If it had not been for the solid social position of President West and the prestige of the trust company, whose ward she was, it is probable that Adelle would have been sent packing by the end of the second day. As it was, the head mistress said to Miss Stevens, with a sigh of commendable Christian resignation,--"We must do our best for the poor little thing--send her in to me after dinner."