Just Patty Part 6

Mae was divided between curiosity and anger. She s.n.a.t.c.hed the photograph away, cast one glance at the languishing brown eyes, and tumbled it, face downward, into a bureau drawer.

"Don't ever mention his name to me again!" she commanded, as, with compressed lips, she commenced brushing her hair for dinner.

On the next Friday afternoon--shopping day in the village--Patty and Conny and Priscilla dropped in at the florist's to pay a bill.

"Two bunches of sunflowers, one dollar," the man had just announced in ringing tones from the rear of the store, when a step sounded behind them, and they faced about to find Mae Mertelle Van Arsdale, bent on a similar errand.

"Oh!" said Mae, fiercely, "I might have known it was you three."

She stared for a moment in silence, then she dropped into a rustic seat and buried her head on the counter. She had shed so many tears of late that they flowed automatically.

"I suppose," she sobbed, "you'll tell the whole school, and everybody will laugh and--and--"

The three regarded her with unbending mien. They were not to be moved by a few tears.

"You said that Rosalie was a silly little goose to make such a fuss over nothing," Priscilla reminded her.

"And at least he was a live man," said Patty, "even if he did have a crooked nose."

"Do you still think she was a silly goose?" Conny inquired.

"N--no!"

"Don't you think you've been a great deal more silly?"

"Y--yes."

"And will you apologize to Rosalie?"

"No!"

"It will make quite a funny story," Patty ruminated, "the way we'll tell it."

"I think you're perfectly horrid!"

"Will you apologize to Rosalie?" Priscilla asked again.

"Yes--if you'll promise not to tell."

"We'll promise on one condition--you're to break your engagement to Cuthbert St. John, and never refer to it again."

Cuthbert sailed for England on the _Oceanic_ the following Thursday; St.

Ursula's plunged into a fever of basket-ball, and the atmosphere became bracingly free of Romance.

III

The Virgil Strike

"I'm tired of Woman's Rights on Friday afternoons," said Patty disgustedly. "I prefer soda water!"

"This makes the third time they've taken away our holiday for the sake of a beastly lecture," Priscilla grumbled, as she peered over Patty's shoulder to read the notice on the bulletin board, in Miss Lord's perpendicular library hand.

It informed the school that instead of the usual shopping expedition to the village, they would have the pleasure that afternoon of listening to a talk by Professor McVey of Columbia University. The subject would be the strike of the women laundry workers. Tea would be served in the drawing-room afterwards, with Mae Van Arsdale, Harriet Gladden, and Patty Wyatt as hostesses.

"It's not my turn!" objected Patty, as she noted the latter item. "I was hostess two weeks ago."

"That's because you wrote an essay on the 'Eight Hour Day.' Lordie thinks you will ask the professor-man intelligent questions; and show him that St. Ursula's is not a common boarding-school where only superficial accomplishments are taught, but one in which the actual problems of--"

"And I did want to go shopping!" Patty mourned. "I need some new shoe-strings. I've been tying a knot in my old ones every day for a week."

"Here she comes," whispered Priscilla. "Look happy or she'll make you translate the whole--Good morning, Miss Lord! We were just noticing about the lecture. It sounds extremely interesting."

The two smiled a perfunctory greeting, and followed their teacher to the morning's Latin.

Miss Lord was the one who struck the modern note at St. Ursula's. She believed in militant suffragism and unions and boycotts and strikes; and she labored hard to bring her little charges to her own advanced position. But it was against a heavy inertia that she worked. Her little charges didn't care a rap about receiving their rights, in the dim future of twenty-one; but they were very much concerned about losing a present half-holiday. On Friday afternoons, they were ordinarily allowed to draw checks on the school bank for their allowances, and march in a procession--a teacher forming the head and tail--to the village stores, where they laid in their weekly supply of hair ribbons and soda water and kodak films. Even had one acquired so many demerits that her weekly stipend was entirely eaten up by fines, still she marched to the village and watched the lucky ones disburse. It made a break in the monotony of six days of bounds.

But every cloud has its silver lining.

Miss Lord preceded the Virgil recitation that morning by a discussion of the lecture to come. The laundry strike, she told them, marked an epoch in industrial history. It proved that women, as well as men, were capable of standing by each other. The solidarity of labor was a point she wished her girls to grasp. Her girls listened with grave attention; and by eagerly putting a question, whenever she showed signs of running down, they managed to stave off the Latin recitation for three quarters of an hour.

The professor, a mild man with a Van d.y.k.e beard, came and lectured exhaustively upon the relations of employer and employed. His audience listened with politely intelligent smiles, but with minds serenely occupied elsewhere. The great questions of Capital and Labor, were not half so important to them, as the fact of the lost afternoon, or the essays that must be written for to-morrow's English, or even that this was ice-cream night with dancing cla.s.s to follow. But Patty, on the front seat, sat with wide, serious eyes fixed on the lecturer's face.

She was absorbing his arguments--and storing them for use.

Tea followed according to schedule. The three chosen ones received their guests with the facility of long-tried hostesses. The fact that their bearing was under inspection, with marks to follow, did not appreciably diminish their case. They were learning by the laboratory method, the social graces that would be needed later in the larger world. Harriet and Mae presided at the tea table, while Patty engaged the personage in conversation. He commented later, to Miss Lord, upon the students' rare understanding in economic subjects.

Miss Lord replied with some complaisance that she endeavored to have her girls think for themselves. Sociology was a field in which lessons could not be taught by rote. Each must work out her own conclusions, and act upon them.

Ice-cream and dancing restored the balance of St. Ursula's, after the mental exertions of the afternoon. At half-past nine--the school did not retire until ten on dancing nights--Patty and Priscilla dropped their goodnight courtesy, murmured a polite "_Bon soir, Mam'selle_," and scampered upstairs, still very wide awake. Instead of preparing for bed with all dispatch, as well-conducted school girls should, they engaged themselves in practising the steps of their new Spanish dance down the length of the South Corridor. They brought up with a pirouette at Rosalie Patton's door.

Rosalie, still in the pale blue fluffiness of her dancing frock, was sitting cross-legged on the couch, her yellow curls bent over the open pages of a Virgil, tears spattering with dreary regularity on the lines she was conning.

The course of Rosalie's progress through senior Latin might be marked by blistered pages. She was a pretty, cuddling, helpless little thing, deplorably babyish for a senior; but irresistibly appealing. Everyone teased her, and protected her, and loved her. She was irrevocably predestined to bowl over the first man who came along, with her ultra feminine irresponsibility. Rosalie very often dreamed--when she ought to have been concentrating upon Latin grammar--of that happy future state in which smiles and kisses would take the place of gerunds and gerundives.

"You silly little m.u.f.f!" cried Patty. "Why on earth are you bothering with Latin on a Friday night?"

She landed herself with a plump on Rosalie's right, and took away the book.

"I have to," Rosalie sobbed. "I'd never finish if I didn't begin. I don't see any sense to it. I can't do eighty lines in two hours. Miss Lord always calls on me for the end, because she knows I won't know that."

"Why don't you begin at the end and read backwards?" Patty practically suggested.

"But that wouldn't be fair, and I can't do it so fast as the others. I work more than two hours every day, but I simply never get through. I know I shan't pa.s.s."

"Eighty lines is a good deal," Patty agreed.