e had that her
mother had made a mistake in sending them to Miss Leland's, which gave
them little or nothing that they could use, and was very likely to
affect even her own steady vision of their circumstances and
opportunities. She was continually trying to counteract the
consequences of this mistake; but Alma was less than willing to take
her point of view.

Nancy still clung to her plan of getting herself ready for college;
never for a moment could she lose sight of the fact that in all
probability she would have to make her own living, which Alma, like her
mother, was very ready to forget, counting always as they did on happy
chance, to smooth out the future for them into a sunny vista. It was
not that Nancy was a pessimist. She simply believed that good luck was
something more or less of one's own making. She was full of eagerness
and enthusiasm for life, as ardent as an ambitious boy, and restive to
make a trial of her own capabilities. She knew that there was a
possibility of her uncle's providing for them, after all, in spite of
his own very clear hints to the contrary; but on the other hand, there
remained the fact that he was an eccentric old fellow, more than
equally likely to bequeath his entire fortune to some freakish project,
or obscure charity organization.

It was not a very easy task to study seriously at Miss Leland's. An
earnest student was immediately dubbed, vividly enough, if inelegantly,
a "greasy grind"--and was left more or less to her own devices; but if
Nancy was not as popular as Alma, she was regarded with a good deal of
respect and genuine admiration by the other girls, and in Charlotte
Spencer she had found a really devoted friend.

Underneath her apparent rattle-patedness, Charlotte concealed from the
view of those for whom she had no especial regard a stratum of rather
unusual common sense, mingled with an idealism and a youthful ardor
which few would have suspected in her nature. Opinions concerning her
varied widely. Mildred Lloyd considered her crude, for example; most
of the girls thought her simply amusing and odd, and hardly knew how to
account for some of her queer, serious moods. In one way or another,
without apparently studying at all, she managed always to take the
highest marks in the school.

She was the only daughter of a very rich Western mine-owner, a widower,
who found the problem of managing this child of his more difficult than
any commercial nut he had