they "didn't remember," just like their papas
and future husbands when they were cornered on the witness stand by
inconvenient questions about shady transactions.

The tone of the school was distinctly fashionable, also idle and
luxurious, which was what its patrons desired. Many of the mothers and
other female relatives of the girls, besides the "old girls" themselves,
ran up to the school from New York, which was not far away, bringing
with them a rich atmosphere of jewels, clothes, and gossip that seemed
to hang about the large drawing-room of the stately stone mansion. The
more fortunate pupils found frequent excuses for getting down to the gay
city for the theater and parties, and there were besides boys from a
neighboring college, with parties to the races, all discreetly
chaperoned, of course.

Miss Thompson was at great pains to maintain what the "old Hall girls"
called the "tone of Herndon," so that careful mothers and fathers should
have no hesitation in confiding to it their daughters from fear that
they might encounter "undesirable associates." In all the years of its
existence Miss Thompson had never admitted a member of a certain
religious creed. Yet latterly there had been rumors that the Hall was
not what it once had been. There were too many "Western" girls: some
said Herndon was getting "Pittsburghy." There were certain lively
daughters of Western millionaires, two in especial from the great State
of California whom Adelle later on was thrown with, who did not add to
the exclusive atmosphere of the Hall.

The path of the manager of a fashionable school is by no means an easy
one. It is, in fact, as Miss Thompson had found, more difficult than the
famous eye of the needle. For if she were so scrupulous as to bar out
all the daughters of new wealth, she was in danger of lacking that
material support without which Herndon Hall could not be maintained. And
if she admitted too freely rich "Western girls" whose parents were
"nobodies," but were keenly anxious to have their daughters become
"somebodies," she was in danger of watering her wine to the point where
it would lose all its potency. A constant equilibrium between the
good-family class and the merely rich must be maintained if the school
was to preserve its position. And so it can be understood why the
proprietor and the teachers of Herndon Hall carefully scrutinized Adelle
on her first appearance. Would she merely water their precious wine? If
so