a
girl! She needs stirring up. She's just like a big, fat, spoiled baby. I
feel like saying 'Goo-goo' to her."

"Don't you think Juno Gibson is handsome?" asked Peggy.

"Just as handsome as she can be, but I wish she didn't look so
discontented all the time. Why, she hasn't smiled once since we came."

"I wonder why not?" commented Peggy.

"Maybe we'll find out after we've been here a while. But I tell you one
thing, I like her better without any smiles than that silly Helen
Gwendolyn Doolittle with her everlasting affected giggling at nothing.
She is the kind to do some silly thing and make us all ashamed of her."

"How about Stella Drummond?"

"She is a puzzle to me. Doesn't she seem an awful lot older than the
rest of us? Rosalie says she is eighteen and that's not so much older,
but she seems about twenty-five. I wonder why?"

"Maybe she has lived in cities all her life and gone out a lot. You know
most of the girls we met up at New London seemed so much older too, yet
they really were not. They looked upon us as children, though the Little
Mother said we were years older in common sense while they were years
older in worldly experience,--I wonder what she meant?"

"Tanta meant that we had stayed young girls and could enjoy fun and
frolic as much as ever, but those girls were not satisfied with anything
but dances and theatres and all sorts of grown-up things. We have our
fun with our horses, dogs and the nonsense with the boys up home. We
want our skirts short and our hair flying and to romp when we feel like
it."

"Picture Helen or Lily Pearl romping," and Peggy dove under the covers
to smother her laughter at the thought of the fat, pudgy Lily Pearl
attempting anything of the sort. Polly snickered in sympathy and then
said in her emphatic way:

"I tell you, Peggy, which girls I _do_ like and I think they will like
us: Marjorie Terry and Natalie Vincent. Marjorie is awfully sober and
quiet, I know, but _I_ believe she's sort of lonely, or homesick or
something. Natalie seems more like our own kind than any girl in the
school and I'll wager my tennis racquet she'll be lots of fun if she is
the Principal's daughter. But we'd better go to sleep this minute. We've
made a sort of hash of seven girls, and if we try to size up the whole
school this way it will be broad daylight before we finish. Good-night.
It's sort of nice to be here after all, and nicer still to have you for
a room-mate, old Peggoty."

A