rone in the school because she was "dead easy" and
connived at much that might have resulted scandalously. "Rosy" shared
the girls' tastes for sweets, dress, and jewelry, and smuggled into the
Hall, not candy--because that was openly permitted in any quantity--but
forbidden "naughty" novels.

Miss Stevens had the deadliest weapon at her command that Adelle had
ever encountered--sarcasm. "My dear girl," she would say before a
tableful of girls, in the pityingly sweet tone of an experienced woman
of the world to a vulgar nobody, "how can you speak like that!" (This
when Adelle had emitted the vernacular grunt in answer to some
question.) "You are not a little ape, my dear." Then she would mimic in
her dainty drawl Adelle's habit of speech, which, of course, set all the
girls at the table tittering. Adelle naturally did not love "Rosy," but
she was helpless before her darts. The other teachers generally ignored
her presence, treating her with the perfect politeness of complete
indifference. Once, soon after her arrival, the child was caught talking
with one of the housemaids in the upper corridor, and was severely
reprimanded. She had merely sought for a ray of human sunlight, but she
was told that young women of her station in life were never familiar
with servants. In a word, Adelle was more nearly encased in an airproof
lining at Herndon Hall than ever before, and remained for another two
years the pale, furtive, undeveloped child she was when she first came.
Some cures, it seems, are so radical that they paralyze the nervous
system and develop rather than cure the disease. Such was the case of
Adelle in Herndon Hall. For nearly two years she sneaked about its
comfortable premises, a silent, forlorn, miserable little being,
frightened at what she could not understand, ready for a blow, but not
keen enough to put up a protecting hand. The verdict of the school was
that "the little fright of a Clark girl" was too stupid to learn
anything. As one girl said to "Rosy,"--"The Clark girl must have piles
of money to be here at all."

And the teacher replied,--"She'll need it all, every cent, she's so
deadly common."

* * * * *

Let no reader suppose that Herndon Hall in which Adelle was suffering
her martyrdom is typical of all fashionable girls' boarding-schools. In
a real sense nothing in this life is sufficiently universal to be
considered typical. There are to-day many schools that have so