driveway. Unluckily, Miss Baylis had seen this harmless
little performance, and not being able to appreciate perfect human and
equine grace, had been promptly scandalized. It was at once reported to
Miss Woodhull and Beverly was informed that "such hoydenish actions
should be relegated to the uncultured herd."

Beverly did not ask whether she must number herself among that herd but
the fact had been implied nevertheless, and she smarted under what she
felt to be an unmerited and unduly severe rebuke, if not an open insult.

She was still smarting as she sat hidden in her nook, and sorely in need
of an antidote for the smart.

Presently it came in the homeopathic form of like curing like.

CHAPTER VI

NEW FRIENDS

Naturally, no real work was done on opening day. Miss Woodhull, stately
and austere sat in her office directing her staff with the air of an
empress. One of the old girls declared that all she lacked was a crown
and sceptre, and the new ones who entered that office to be registered,
"tagged" the above mentioned girl called it, came out of it feeling at
least three inches shorter than when they entered. During her reign in
Leslie Manor, Miss Woodhull had grown much stouter and one seeing her
upon this opening day would scarcely have recognized in her the slender,
hollow-eyed worn-out woman who had opened its doors to the budding
girlhood of the land nearly thirty years before. She was now a
well-rounded, stately woman who carried herself with an air of owning the
state of her adoption, and looked comparatively younger in her
fifty-eighth year than she had in her twenty-eighth.

As Beverly sat in her nook watching the little girls of the primary
grades run out to their playground at the rear of the building, the old
girls of the upper classes pair off and stroll away through the extensive
grounds, and the new ones drift thither and yonder like rudderless craft,
she saw two girls come from Miss Woodhull's office. One was a trifle
shorter than Beverly and plump as a woodcock. She was not pretty but
piquant, with a pair of hazel eyes that crinkled at the corners, a saucy
pug nose, a mouth like a Cupid's bow and a mop of the curliest red-brown
hair Beverly had ever seen. Her companion was tall, slight, graceful,
distinguished. A little aristocrat from the top of her raven black hair
to the tips of her daintily shod feet was Aileen Norman and