e people do. Cornie Dean was telling me about
a girl who was in the school last year who made such a fuss about her
pedigree that she couldn't be friends with more than three of the girls.
The rest weren't high enough caste for her. She sported a crest and all
that, and they found out that she hadn't a particle of right to it. Her
father had struck it rich in some lumber deal, and _bought_ a gallery of
ancestral portraits, and paid a man a small fortune to fix him up a coat
of arms. She had no end of money, but she wasn't the real thing, and
Cornie says that paste diamonds won't go down with _this_ school. They
can spot them every time."

Ethelinda made no comment for a moment, but presently asked in a
strained tone, "Did you have any doubts of Miss Berkeley's claims? Is
that why you looked her up in the peerage?"

"No," said Mary, honestly. "I was looking for my own name. But there
wasn't a single Ware in it. And then"--she couldn't resist this thrust,
especially as she felt it was a part of the missionary work she had
undertaken--"I looked for Hurst, too, as the girls said you had a
crest."

"Well?" came the question, a trifle defiantly.

"It's not in the Peerage."

Ethelinda drew herself up haughtily as if she disdained an explanation,
yet felt forced to make one. "It is not my father's crest I use," she
announced. "It came from back in my mother's family."

"Oh!" said Mary, with significant emphasis. "I see!" Then she added
cheerfully, "I could have one, too, on a count like _that_, way back
among my great-grandmothers. But I wouldn't have any real right to it.
You have to be in the direct line of descent, you know, and it is silly
for us Americans to try to hang on by a hair to the main trunk of the
family tree, when all the world knows we belong on the outside
branches."

There was no answer to this and the dressing proceeded in a silence as
profound as the morning's, until Mary saw that Ethelinda was struggling
in a frantic effort to free herself from the hooks of her dress which
had caught in her hair.

"Wait," she called, hurrying to the rescue. "Let me hook it for you.
What a perfect dream of a gown it is!" she added in frank admiration,
as she deftly fastened it up the back. "It looks like the kind in the
fairy tales that are woven out of moon-beams. Here, let me fix your
hair, where the hooks pulled it loose."

She tucked in the straggling locks with a few soft pats and touches
which, with the co