. Even among the softest and snobbiest of boys
and masters there will always remain a residuum of male self-respect. If
the newcomer, no matter how wrongly classed, proves that he has physical
courage, or an aptitude for sports, or even a sunny, common-sense
disposition, he will quickly escape from his probationary period of
torture and become tolerated; while if a girl appears among her future
schoolmates with an ill-made, unfashionable frock, or has manners that
betray less sophistication than is to be expected, she may never survive
the torture that begins on the instant and follows her relentlessly, in
the schoolroom and out, until she either adapts herself to her
environment, becoming in turn a torturer, or is removed to a more
congenial environment.

Adelle Clark presented to the little world of Herndon Hall a very
vulnerable appearance when she arrived at the school on that Friday
evening. She was still wearing the blue serge school dress that she and
her aunt had made for her high-school debut, also some coarse, faded
brown stockings, and stout cheap shoes, not to mention an unmentionable
hat of no style at all. She had taken that unfortunate joke of the trust
company's president literally: she must not waste her substance upon
clothes. Even without this inhibition she had scarcely the skill and the
courage necessary to spend her two hundred dollars to advantage in three
days. So she had bought herself a trunk, a few suits of much-needed
heavy underwear, some handkerchiefs, and a coat that she had desired all
winter, a thick, clumsy affair that completely enveloped her slight
figure. Then her imagination of wants had given out.

The young teacher, who had taken Miss Thompson's place because of a
sudden indisposition that attacked the head mistress, had made Adelle
uncomfortably aware that something was wrong, but she put down her
coolness and unsympathetic silence during their brief journey to the
fact that Miss Stevens was a "teacher" and therefore felt "superior,"
"Rosy," as the older Hall girls called Miss Stevens, was not at all
"superior" in her attitude to the girls. She dressed quite smartly and
youthfully and was their best confidante. But she had received a shock
when she saw "that little fright" (as she reported to Miss Thompson)
timidly sitting on the edge of her chair in the parlor of the Eclair
Hotel. "Where can she come from?" she had said to herself; and later she
had supplemented this query by t