in a petticoat! You ought to
powder your hair and wear patches."

"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home. "She has
n't read any book that is n't a thousand years old. One of the girls
says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I
believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is
Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."

Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled
to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few
young gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month
after Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best,
and by and by they were to have a tableau. Myrtle came out in all her
force. She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome
woman of the past generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the
dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the
young girl whose position in the school was assured from that moment.
She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or
three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by
some of their talk which has been given. There is no possible success
without some opposition as a fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and
crowds something or other, if it does not hit or trample on it.

The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the
great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at
the gathering.

"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara? By
Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a
first-class beauty. Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara. If a
girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that,
I know a good many who had better begin their nap without waiting. If I
were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,--eh, Clara?"

Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the
depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own. A
little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the
same sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston
Jenkins's repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with
a change in the arrangement of the proper names. The two young ladies
were left feeling compa