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an to amuse the girls, so they were left pretty much to themselves, and passed the ten days of vacation in the best way they could. "Girls will be girls," that was what Miss Ashton said when the pupils who had been at home came back with their summer outfits, and she found the whole attention of the school given for a few days to their examination and comparison. "If I could hear you talk half as much about any branch of study, or your art lessons, as I hear you talk about your new clothes," she said with a pleasant laugh, "I should be delighted; but I suppose nothing seems more important to you now than the fashions, and, on the whole, I don't know but I am glad of it." It was this interest in their many-sided life that gave Miss Ashton her great influence over them. The girls would take articles of apparel to her for her inspection, and find them doubly valuable if they met with her approval. There was one set whose wardrobes were objects of especial interest: those were the graduating class. Next to her bridal dress, there seems to be no other that is thought so much of, not only by the girl, but by her parents. It would be idle, perhaps out of place here, to say how much display and foolish extravagance there is at such a time. Where it can be well afforded, it is of comparatively little importance, but a great deal of heartache might be avoided, if the simplest costume were decided to be the most suitable. Parents whose means have been tried to the utmost to give their child the advantages of the school, who have never hesitated over any labor or self-denial in order to accomplish it, find themselves at last called to confront the question of dollars, hardly earned or saved, squandered on a dress almost worthless for future use, on pain of seeing their child mortified and unhappy because she cannot, on this eventful occasion, look as well as the others. Even Miss Ashton's influence, great as it was, had failed to accomplish any good result in changing this long-established custom; and for reasons best known to themselves, the present senior class had voted in their class meetings to make their graduation day one long to be remembered in the annals of the school. CHAPTER XXXIV. NEMESIS. Until this year this academy had had a salutatory and a valedictory in the same way they did at Atherton Academy, given for the best scholarship as it was there; but as this was considered a finishing scho
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