love-letter!

The news darted from class-room to class-room more quickly than little
Monsieur Pilotell, the French literature professor; it spread like the
measles, and magnified like the mumps.

The Red Class, composed of the elder girls, "young ladies" who were
undergoing the process of finishing, surged with volcanic excitement,
hidden, but not in the least repressed. The White Class, their juniors,
who were chiefly employed in preparing for Confirmation, should have been
immersed in graver things, but were not. They waited on mental tiptoe for
details, and a peep at the delicious document. The Blue Class, as became
mere infants ranging from six to ten years old, remained phlegmatically
indifferent to the missive, yet avid for samples of the chocolates that
had accompanied the declaration, made to eighty girls of all ages by one
undersized, pasty, freckled young man employed as junior clerk and
chain-assistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end of a
long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of Billy Keyse.

He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision of Greta Du Taine
out walking at the head of the long winding procession of English, German,
Dutch, Dutch-French, Dutch-American, and Jewish girls. They are sent now
to be taught in Europe, those daughters of the Rand millionaires, the
Stock Exchange speculators, the wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal-growers,
or cattle and sheep breeders, who are descended themselves from the old
pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not get a better education than was
to be had at the Convent school at Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of
Mercy took in and taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a
strongly stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir and
Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These they tamed, these they
transformed into refined, cultivated, accomplished young women, stamped
with the indefinable seal of high breeding, possessed of the tone and
manner that belongs to the upper world.

What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the Holy Way at
Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any Order of Religious? They are a
Community, chiefly of ladies of high breeding and ancient family, vowed to
feed the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the dying, and
instruct the ignorant. Like the Fathers of the Society of Jesuits, those
skilled, patient, wise tillers in the soil of the human mind, their d