squelching. It was the queerest
thing that they were not even acquainted really after the many weeks.
There was a shell around this junior all the time. It made Ellen feel
meaner and smaller and more insignificant every minute. The freshman
pressed her forehead wearily against the glass.

"Oh, look! There come the girls. They're your friends away down on the
lawn. Miss Abbott, I think, and Miss Leigh, and Miss Sanders. See, see!
The rollicking wind and the racing clouds! Their skirts blow. They hold
on their tams. They are looking up at us. They are waving something.
Maybe it is violets, don't you think? Once I found violets in March.
Can't you smell the air almost? I'm going to open the window. I am, I am!
Who's afraid of getting chilled?"

"I would advise you not to do anything so utterly foolhardy," spoke
Lila's frigid voice. A certain inflection in the tone made Ellen shrink
away instinctively. For an instant she looked full into the serene,
indifferent eyes, and her own seemed to flutter as if struggling against
the contempt she saw there. Then with a defiant lift of her head she
hurried to the writing table and seized the pencil which Lila had dropped
upon rising to approach the window.

A few minutes later when the older girl turned from the greetings and
messages in pantomime with her friends below, she saw Ellen's rough head
bending over a paper. It was a needlessly untidy head. During the weeks
of close confinement and enforced companionship, she had felt her dislike
steadily growing. The girl was on her nerves. She was wholly
disagreeable. Everything about her was displeasing, her careless
enunciation, queer little face, coarse clothes, impulsive, crude ways,
even occasional mistakes in grammar. She told herself that the child had
no breeding, no manners, no sense of the fitness of things. There was no
reason why she should admit her into the circle of her intimates merely
because the two had been thrown together by the exigencies of an attack
of scarlet fever. Such a fortuitous relation would be severed in the
shortest possible time, completely and irremediably severed. Trust Lila
Allan, president of the junior literary society, to manage that.
Meanwhile she intended to leave the girl severely alone. Think of the
impudence of calling her Lila! Lila, indeed! And that hint about reading
aloud! The incredible impertinence of it! And to appropriate her pencil!
Atrocious!

But of course she would keep on bei