CHAPTER IX HILDA

On Monday morning Patty started for her second week at the Oliphant school without any misgivings as to her reception by the girls.

Although little had been said regarding Lorraine, and though Patty had loyally refrained from disclaiming her as an intimate friend, yet Clementine and Adelaide both understood matters better now, and were quite ready to accept Patty on her own merits.

So it came about that she walked to school between Adelaide and Lorraine, and though her two companions had little to say to each other, Patty skilfully managed to be pleasant and sociable with both.

Of course the morning was entirely occupied with lessons, but at the noon hour Adelaide appropriated Patty and carried her off to join a group off girls who were merrily chatting together. Clementine was one of them, and in a few moments Patty discovered that they were all Gigs, and seemed proud of the appellation.

“It will be the most fun,” Flossy Fisher was saying; “I’ll manage the Elephant—I can always wind her around my finger—and she won’t know what it’s all about until she finds herself down cellar in front of the mirror. You’ll come to it, won’t you, Patty?”

“What is it, and where, and when, and how, and why?” asked Patty, laughing; “you see I’m a new girl, and a green one. But I suppose from your mention of the elephant, you’re talking about a circus.”

“It will be a circus,” said Clementine, “but a little private one of our own. The Elephant is our pet name for Miss Oliphant, and we Gigs are always playing tricks on her. She pretends she doesn’t like it, but I think she does, for often behind her frowning spectacles she hides a smiling face.”

“Isn’t Clementine the cleverest thing!” exclaimed Adelaide; “she can misquote from all the standard British and American authors. It’s a great thing to be the bright and shining light of the Literature class.”

“But tell me more about this elephant performance,” said Patty; “why are you going to put Miss Oliphant down cellar?”

“Sh! breathe it not aloud,” warned Clementine; “the Wild West must not hear it. It isn’t until Hallowe’en, you know, and then——”

The announcement of luncheon interrupted this conversation, and the girls started for the dining-room. Adelaide insisted that Patty should sit at their table, but for two reasons Patty hesitated about this.

In the first place she did not quite want to desert Lorraine so completely; and second, she was not yet sure that she wanted to proclaim herself one of the Gigs. Still less did she want to be a Prig, and she well knew she could never by the widest stretch of imagination be called a Dig, so she concluded not to ally herself definitely with either of these mystic orders until she had opportunity for further consideration.

So she firmly but good-naturedly declined to change her table for the present, and took her usual place by the side of Lorraine.

“Well,” said Lorraine, pettishly, “you seem to have made a great many new friends.”

“Yes,” said Patty, determined to be pleasant, “I have. I’m getting better acquainted with the girls, and I think they’re a very nice lot. You can’t judge much the first few days, you know. Clementine is a dear, isn’t she?”

“I don’t see anything dear about her. I think she’s silly and stuck-up.”

“Why, Lorraine, how absurd! Clementine isn’t stuck-up at all.”

“Well, I think she is, and, anyway, I don’t like her.” After which gracious speech Lorraine devoted herself to eating her luncheon, and was so unresponsive to further attempts at conversation that Patty gave it up, and turned to talk to the girl on the other side of her.

This was Hilda Henderson, an English girl, who had lived in America only about two years. She was slender, yet with a suggestion of hardy strength in her small bones and active muscles. She had a quick nervous manner, and her head, which was daintily set on her shoulders, moved with the alert motions of a bird. Not exactly pretty, but with dark straight hair and dark eyes, she looked like a girl of fine traits and strong character.

Patty had liked the appearance of this girl from the first, but had not seemed to be able to make friends with her.

But fortified by the new conditions which were developing, she made overtures with a little more confidence.

“You are a boarding pupil here, aren’t you?” said Patty. “Do you know anything about the plans for a Hallowe’en party?”

“No,” said Hilda, “except that there’s going to be one. I fancy it will be just like last year’s party.”

“Are they nice? What do you do at them?”

“Yes, they’re rather good fun. We bob for apples, and go downstairs backward, and sail nut-shell boats, and all those things.”

Patty said nothing further about Miss Oliphant’s part in it, as she thought perhaps it was a secret.

“You must have real good times living here,” she went on; “so many of you girls all together.”

“Yes, it’s not so very horrid; though it’s very unlike an English boarding school. American girls are so enthusiastic.”

“Yes, we are; but I like that, don’t you?”

“Oh, if one has anything to be excited over, it’s all very well; but you waste such a lot of enthusiasm that, when anything comes along really worth while, you have no words left to show your appreciation of it.”

“Oh, I have,” said Patty, laughing. “Or if I haven’t, I use the same words over again. They don’t wear out, you know.”

“Yes, they do,” said Hilda, earnestly; “you say everything is perfectly grand or gorgeous when it’s most commonplace. And then when you come across something really grand or gorgeous what can you say?”

“Of course that’s all true; but that’s just a way we have. You like America, don’t you?”

“Yes, rather well. But I never shall learn to rave over nothing the way you all do.”

“How do you know I do? You scarcely know me at all yet.”

“You’re not as much so as the rest. And I think I shall like you. But I don’t make friends easily, and often I don’t get on with the very ones I most want to.”

“Oh, you’ll get on with me all right if you have the least mite of a wish to. I make friends awfully easily. That is, I generally have,” supplemented Patty, suddenly remembering her experiences of the past week.

“I think I’d like to be friends with you,” said Hilda, with an air of thoughtful caution, “but of course I can’t say yet.”

“Of course not!” said Patty, unable to resist poking a little fun at this very practical girl; “I think you ought to know anybody four weeks before you decide, and then take them on trial.”

“I think so, too,” said Hilda, heartily, taking Patty quite seriously, though the speech had been meant entirely in jest. “You’re awfully sensible, for an American.”

“Yes, I think I am,” said Patty, demurely.

After luncheon another triumph awaited Patty.

Gertrude Lyons and Maude Carleton came up to her, and each taking her by one arm, walked her over to the bay-window, where they might talk uninterruptedly.

“We want you to be in our set,” said Gertrude; “we have the nicest girls in school in our set, and I know you’ll like it best of any.”

“And we have the best times,” put in Maude; “none of the sets can do the things we do.”

Patty did not altogether like this sudden change of attitude on the part of these girls. And, too, they seemed to her a little condescending in their manner. She liked better Hilda Henderson’s proposition, which, though less flattering, seemed to promise better results.

And she had not forgotten Gertrude’s real rudeness the week before.

“Thank you ever so much,” she said, “but I’m not sure that I want to join your set. Last week you didn’t want me, and turn about is fair play.” Patty’s pleasant smile, as she said this, robbed the words of all harshness and made it impossible for the girls to feel offended.

“I suppose I was hateful,” said Gertrude, “and I take it all back. But, you see, everybody said you were Lorraine Hamilton’s chum and that you were just like her. Now, you’re not a bit like her, and I don’t believe you’re such a great chum of hers. Are you?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” said Patty, smiling; “I’m a friend of Lorraine’s, and always shall be, I hope; but I’m not such a chum of hers that I can’t be friends with anybody else.”

“That’s what I said,” put in Maude; “and so there’s no reason why you can’t belong to our set, even if Lorraine doesn’t.”

“Why do they call you the Prigs?” asked Patty.

Gertrude laughed. “They think the name teases us,” she said; “but it doesn’t a bit. They call us Prigs because they think we’re stuck-up, and so we are. We’re the richest girls in the school and we belong to the best families. But that isn’t all; we have the best manners, and we’re never rude or awkward, and we’re always perfect in deportment, so we’re almost always on the Privileged Roll.”

“What’s the Privileged Roll?” asked Patty.

“Why, it’s a special Roll of Honour, and if your name’s on it you have a lot of little extra favours and privileges that the others don’t have. The Gigs, now, they never get on the Privileged Roll. They have a lot of fun, but I think it’s silly and babyish.”

“And the Digs?” asked Patty. “Are they on the Privileged Roll?”

“Not often,” said Gertrude; “they get perfect in their lessons, of course, but they’re so busy studying they are apt to forget their manners. Hilda Henderson is a Dig, but she has good manners because she’s English. English girls always do; they can’t seem to help it.”

“I like Hilda Henderson,” said Patty; “she seems to me an awfully nice girl.”

“Yes, she’s nice enough,” said Maude, carelessly; “but she’s rather heavy and not up to our ideas of fun.”

The class-bell rang just then and with a promise to think about joining Gertrude’s set, Patty left them.

After school she walked home with Lorraine. Adelaide had been detained and the two girls went home alone.

“I suppose you’ll be dreadfully thick with the Prigs, now that they’ve taken you up,” said Lorraine.

“They haven’t taken me up yet,” replied Patty, a little shortly.

“Well, they’re beginning to hang around you, so I suppose they will take you up soon.”

“They’ve already asked me to join their set, if that’s what you mean by ‘taking up.’?”

“Well, then of course you’ll join it, and I suppose you’ll have no use for me after that.”

“Now, look here, Lorraine, we might as well have this out now, once for all. I’d like to be a friend of yours, but there are lots of times when you make me feel as if you didn’t want me to be. And besides, I expect to be friends with everybody. That’s the way I always have been; it’s my nature. And if being friends with you is going to prevent my having anything to do with anybody else in the whole school, why then I’m not going to do it, that’s all.”

“I told you so,” said Lorraine, staring moodily before her; “I knew when those Prigs took you up you’d drop me.”

“But I won’t drop you, Lorraine,” said Patty, exasperated by such injustice. “And if you drop me, it’s your own fault. What is the matter with you, anyway? Why don’t you like anybody?”

“Because nobody likes me, I suppose,” and Lorraine’s face wore such a helpless, hopeless expression that Patty’s indignation calmed down a little.

“I feel like shaking you,” she said, half angry, half laughing. “Now, see here, why don’t you try a different tack? Just make up your mind that you like everybody, and act so, and first thing you know they’ll all like you.”

Patty expected an irritable retort of some kind, and was surprised when Lorraine said, wistfully:

“Do you really think so, Patty?”

“Of course I do,” cried Patty, delighted to find Lorraine so responsive; “just you try it, girlie, and see if I’m not a true prophet.”

“I’ll try,” said Lorraine, who seemed to be in a particularly gentle mood, at least for the moment; “but I haven’t much hope of myself or anybody else; I’m cross and ugly by nature, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be any different.”

“Oh, pshaw!” cried Patty; “yes, you will. Never mind what you are by nature. Try art. Make believe you’re happy and jolly, like other people, and suddenly you’ll discover that you are.”