nk would have happened, Toinette?"

Toinette pursed her mouth into the primmest pucker, rolled her eyes in a
horrified way, clasped her hands before her, and said, in a tragic tone:
"Young _ladies!_ Such conduct is most _unseemly_," in such perfect mimicry
of Miss Carter that Ruth and Edith shouted.

"Well, all I can say is, that I'm thankful _we_ were not sent to that
school; aren't you, Ruth?" said Edith.

"Better believe I am," was the feeling reply. "I get skittish even in this
blessed place sometimes, but if I had been sent there I'd have been just
like one of those little red imps that Miss Preston has standing on her
writing table."

"Yes, you'd have felt all rubbed the wrong way, just as Cicely and I feel,
and just hate the sight of a teacher, and want to do everything you could
to plague them," said Toinette, petulantly.

"Well, you won't want to do that _here_" answered Edith, emphatically. "If
you cut any such capers in _this_ school, it won't be the _teachers_ who
will go for you, but the _girls_," with a significant wag of her head.

"The girls?" asked Cicely, with a puzzled expression.

"Certain. We think our school about the best going, and we aren't going to
let anyone else think differently, if we can help it; are we, Ruth? So, if
a girl takes it into her head to be rude and cranky to the teachers, or
other girls, she finds herself in a corner pretty quick, I can tell you."

"Suppose you break the rules?" asked Toinette.

"Aren't any to break," answered happy-go-lucky Ruth, as she pranced down
the big room after the ball, which had gone bouncing off.

"No _rules!_" incredulously.

"Not a single one. All you've got to do is to be nice to everybody,
remember you're a gentlewoman (or you wouldn't be here, let me tell you),
and do your jolly best to pass your examinations. If you don't it is your
own fault, and you have to suffer for it; no one else, that's sure; for
you can have all the help you ask for."

Toinette and Cicely exchanged glances.

"Oh, I daresay you don't believe us," said Edith, who had correctly
interpreted the glances, "but just you wait and see. All the new girls
think the same, and I daresay that we should have, too, if we had come
here from some other school; but, thank goodness, we didn't. There aren't
any more schools like this, are there, Ruth?"

"Nary one; there's only one, and we've got it," cried the irrepressible
Ruth, and two weeks later the girls found that, tru