"Oh, just for a dance," said Nancy, "It'll be good fun. Wait for me in
the corridor outside Miss Marlowe's room."
It _was_ good fun, Judith decided a little later as she had her first
dance with Nancy, and then with Sally May--but bewildering. There had
been only about fifty girls in the dining-room at South, and even there
she had been confused by the number of voices, but here the whole
School, some two hundred girls, were gathered, and there was a perfect
Babel of sound.
Nancy piloted them back to South, and as Sally May's luggage had not
come she was fitted out with what she needed. Nancy went to the
housekeeper's room for soap and a toothbrush--Mrs. Bronson kept a supply
for such emergencies; Josephine donated her best crepe nightie--in which
Sally May was presently to look quite lost, so large was it; and Judith
got out her newest and prettiest kimono.
"You'll feel as if you'd been here all your life by the time you get all
these and my old bath slippers on," said Jane saucily. "Come into my
room as soon as you're arrayed in all this glory--there's a little cake
left and I'm going to do my best to find some ginger-ale."
Judith was brushing out her pretty brown hair and looking rather
solemnly at her reflection in the mirror when shrieks of delight
testified to the arrival of some one, who, to judge by the commotion,
must be very popular.
"Cathy, you darling, are you _really_ to be ours? What precious
luck!--Josephine and Jane, and--yes--two new girls--Judith Benson in
twenty-five and Sally May Forsythe in twenty-one."
There was a knock at the door and a clear voice said, "May I come in?"
Judith opened her door and straightway lost her heart when the newcomer
smiled a welcome. Catherine was adored by every beauty-loving girl in
the School, for she had beauty of a rare type--a slender, graceful body,
a well-set little head crowned with a big braid of softly waving dark
brown hair, and haunting, black-lashed Irish blue eyes.
"Isn't she simply lovely?" whispered Nancy after Catherine had gone to
her own room. "And she's just as good as she looks. Oh, goody, I'm _so_
glad she's our prefect!"
Miss Marlowe put her head in the door to say good-night just before the
"Lights out" bell rang, and then Judith was at last alone. She was
bewildered by the mass of new impressions; the twinkling of the
trainman's lanterns as she looked out of her berth in the early
morning; the cold, chilly touch of homesickness when she followed the
porter out of the Pullman; Aunt Nell's welcome; the exciting shopping;
the first glimpse of the school set high on the hill; Aunt Nell's little
sermon; Nancy's merry eyes; the Babel of voices in the gymnasium;
Catherine Ellison's beautiful face; her mother's proud good-bye, "I can
trust you, Judy, darling--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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