vershot the mark.

"I've got an apron like that. I think they're so pretty," she said
cordially, pointing to the one Mrs. Gurley wore.

The latter abruptly stopped her work, and, resting her hands on the
sides of the box, gave Laura one of the dreaded looks over her glasses,
looked at her from top to toe, and as though she were only now
beginning to see her. There was a pause, a momentary suspension of the
breath, which Laura soon learned to expect before a rebuke.

"Little gels," said Mrs. Gurley--and even in the midst of her confusion
Laura could not but be struck by the pronunciation of this word.
"Little gels--are required--to wear white aprons when they come
here!"--a break after each few words, as well as an emphatic
head-shake, accentuated their severity. "And I should like to know, if
your mother, has never taught you, that it is very rude, to point, and
also to remark, on what people wear."

Laura went scarlet: if there was one thing she, Mother all of them
prided themselves on, it was the good manners that had been instilled
into them since their infancy.--The rough reproof seemed to scorch her.

She went to and fro more timidly than before. Then, however, something
happened which held a ray of hope.

"Why, what is this?" asked Mrs. Gurley freezingly, and held up to
view--with the tips of her fingers, Laura thought--a small, black
Prayer Book. "Pray, are you not a dissenter?"--For the College was
nonconformist.

"Well ... no, I'm not," said Laura, in a tone of intense apology. Here,
at last, was her chance. "But it really doesn't matter a bit. I can go
to another church quite well. I even think I'd rather. For a change.
And the service isn't so long, at least so I've heard--except the
sermon," she added truthfully.

Had she denied religion altogether, the look Mrs. Gurley bent on her
could not have been more annihilating.

"There is--unfortunately!--no occasion, for you to do anything of the
kind," she retorted. "I myself, am an Episcopalian, and I expect those
gels, who belong to the Church of England, to attend it, with me."

The unpacking at an end, Mrs. Gurley rose, smoothed down her apron, and
was just on the point of turning away, when on the bed opposite Laura's
she espied an under-garment, lying wantonly across the counterpane. At
this blot on the orderliness of the room she seemed to swell like a
turkey-cock, seemed literally to grow before Laura's eyes as, striding
to the door, she comman