.

"Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will be
strictly attended to in this institution. The most correct standards of
pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example. It will be the
special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils out of all
provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-bred English
scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity."--_Extract from
the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-School._

Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls. Striking, they all agreed,
but then the criticisms began. Many of the girls chattered a little
broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had been half
educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which are to social
operators what his cutting instruments are to the surgeon. Her face she
allowed was handsome; but her style, according to this oracle, was a
little _bourgeoise_, and her air not exactly _comme il faut_. More
specifically, she was guilty of _contours fortement prononces,--corsage
de paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage_, etc., etc. This girl prided
herself on her figure.

Miss Bella Pool, (_La Belle Poule_ as the demi-Parisian girl had
christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of
Myrtle's face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy
girl's.

The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and
Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live
freshman. She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as they
could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of a
queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or two
would make her a belle of the first water. She had that air of
indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is
surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community. On the
other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play; and the
modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the
cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some hundreds of people,
considered her as rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters
of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling
over each other in the golden dust of the great city markets.

She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets. She came
with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply
them, whi