ke the crying kind. And school girl treasures
accumulate fearfully. It's nice to have a place to put the new ones."

She had a small photograph of Mrs. Dayton in her writing desk. There had
not been any keepsakes to bring.

"Won't you come and be introduced to some of the girls? They are in
Daisy Bell's room."

"Wouldn't I----" she hesitated.

"Be an intruder? Oh dear no. The sooner you get over these things the
better. Come!"

She took Helen's hand and led her to a room two or three doors down. The
screens had been pushed aside. On one bed sat two girls, two others were
hanging pictures and spreading bric-a-brac on brackets and shelves. One
of the girls was still in short skirts, and Helen felt secretly glad.
This was Daisy Bell.

"Oh, thank goodness you're not grown up," cried Daisy, eyeing her from
head to toe. "I wept, I prayed, I entreated for long skirts, and I
couldn't move my mother, any more than the rock of Gibraltar."

"Well, you're not a senior. Why should you care?"

"How old are you, Miss Grant?"

"Past fourteen the last of June."

"Oh, how tall for that! I'm fifteen. But I have two older sisters, and
they are always saying 'That child, Daisy,' as if I was about seven. How
many sisters have you?"

"None. And no father or mother."

"You poor wretched orphan!"

[Illustration: Helen's first day at Aldred House.--_Page 192._]

"She doesn't look a bit wretched, Roxy Mays," said a girl who had been
surveying her. "The juniors are all down there," nodding toward the
lower end of the hall, "so you might have known she wasn't 'sweet and
twenty.'"

"At what age do you begin to grow sweet so as to get ready for the
twenty?"

"Oh, girls, don't let's hurry into the twenty. I'd like to stay sixteen
three years, and seventeen four years."

"I wish they'd made the years longer. There could have been another
month or two put in vacation time."

"What is Hope Center like?" asked one of the girls. "It doesn't sound
like a city."

"It's the country, farms mostly. North Hope is the real town part, and
quite pretty, with stores, and churches, and a library, and a small but
nice park."

"There's a lovely old park here. Everything is old. There are the oldest
women you ever saw. One of them shook hands with Lafayette."

"And I've shaken hands with ever so many people and not a Lafayette or a
Washington among them," declared Roxy most lugubriously.

"Now look, girls, would you hang this picture here?"