CHAPTER V

“AND, SAVE HIS GOOD BROADSWORD, HE WEAPONS HAD NONE”

“Fine feathers” may not make “fine birds”; it is generally conceded that true fineness lies somewhat deeper than the plumage, but fine feathers have a marked effect on the minds of ordinary little birds regarding the wearer of them; they have to be birds of considerable experience or native refinement not to judge their fellow bipeds by their plumage.

When the results of Nurse Hummel’s many shopping expeditions with Janet came home, and “Miss Lochinvar” appeared in the tasteful and well-made apparel they had chosen, Gladys treated her cousin with new, if not lasting, respect, and even Sydney showed by several surreptitious glances at her, which keen-eyed Gwen intercepted, that he was realizing for the first time that his quiet Western cousin was worth looking at.

Gwen felt something of the pride of an architect in the building he has created as she wheeled Jan around to view her from every point, and as she saw that the others were newly inclined to admire the girl of whom she was beginning to grow fond, and whom she would have loved dearly if she had not been too self-centered just then to give any one very much affection.

Janet was ashamed to discover that she shrank with no little terror from the ordeal of her first day at school. She felt quite sure that the accomplished young ladies, of whom she had seen examples and who were to be substituted for the girlish girls who had been her classmates in Crescendo, would know so much more than she that they would shame her in learning, as they outstripped her in worldly knowledge. She saw from the first instant that she entered the door that this school was to differ from her previous experiences in more than its pupils.

The Misses Larned, who were its principals--Gwen said that this did not necessarily make them the girls’ _princibles_--did not teach; they were at the head of the school by virtue of proprietorship, and they were the final, awful tribunal before which transgressors were haled, though, it must be confessed, without any more awful consequences, usually, than a severe lecture. But the girls said “they would rather die” than go up before the dignified sisters, “who were so solemn they took the starch out of a body before they opened their lips.” The same irreverent pupils called the school “the Hydra,” because it had two of that monster’s many heads. No one would ever know--none but the boldest dared speculate--what was the extent of the Misses Larned’s own learning. They walked into the class-rooms at intervals, and inquired of the presiding teachers as to the progress of the day’s work with such Minerva-like air that one felt convinced that the wisdom of the ancients and moderns sat enthroned behind their sapient eyeglasses.

They were wise in the selection of their teachers. “The Hydra” was really a very good school in that respect, and the girl who desired knowledge could obtain it there, and an excellent preparation for college beyond. But she who had not this desire could slip through with marvelously little instruction sticking to her brain, for it was a school frequented chiefly by the children of wealthy and fashionable people, and vigorous discipline would have been resented by the majority of the parents.

The school occupied an entire house on a cross-street, near the Park, and Janet passed under its portals with trepidation on her first morning. Gwen sustained her; Gladys had preceded them, and bore herself with a little air of aloofness, in spite of Jan’s better appearance, as if to provide herself against deeper disgrace than was absolutely necessary, in case “Miss Lochinvar” fulfilled her apprehensions.

It was not an easy matter to grade the new pupil. In arithmetic, history, geography, spelling, and in general information her teachers soon discovered that she far surpassed their old pupils, but she was guiltless of French, though, on the other hand, she could speak German--a point no girl in school ever aspired to reach. The extent of the universal ambition in regard to that tongue was to avoid so many mistakes in the gender and cases of nouns as should lead to a serious lowering of averages in marking percentage at the end of the year. On the whole, Janet passed her entrance examination with honor, and was placed in the class with Gwen for everything but French, which she “had to begin with the babies,” as Gladys disdainfully remarked. She was uncertain whether to be relieved or annoyed that “Miss Lochinvar” had been ranked with the best scholars, though Gladys’s ambition did not lead studyward.

A sudden rain prevented the customary brief walk in the Park at recess, and the girls gathered in the large room on the upper floor, formed by joining two rooms together, which was their refuge under such circumstances.

Gwen honestly meant to do her duty by Jan during this first recess, when she was to meet her future mates, but she began to talk to Azucena North, and quite forgot her cousin. Cena North was the daughter of a lady who had been steeped in admiration for Verdi and Trovatore when Cena was born; consequently she had named her baby after the gipsy in that opera, and Cena pathetically said that “if she _must_ be named out of Trovatore she didn’t see why she couldn’t have been called Leonora.” Gwen didn’t see either; she privately pitied her friend deeply for being burdened with such a name as Azucena. But there were compensations, as there are in most misfortunes. Cena was one of the best scholars at the Misses Larned’s, and her father was Mr. North, the head of the great publishing house of North & Co., which Gwen felt accounted for Cena’s thoroughness, as well as partly made up for her name. Cena and Gwen were deep in a plan to lay before Mr. North Gwen’s novel--when it should be finished, of course--without telling him that it was the work of Cena’s classmate, a girl of fifteen. After he had accepted it, and he and his house had exhausted themselves in praise of its many brilliant qualities, Cena was to say demurely that she knew the author, and would bring her to her father’s office. And Gwen was to go with her--wearing her most simple and girlish gown, to increase the dramatic effect--down to the great establishment of North & Co., and Cena was to say, “Behold the new Charlotte Brontë!” or something to that effect. It is no wonder with such a project in hand that Jan slipped from Gwen’s mind when she and Cena collided in the “campus,” as they classically called the playroom. They straightway became oblivious to all but the discussion of ways and means for fulfilling the great plan, which really lacked but the novel to be successful.

Janet wandered on alone, feeling very shy and strange, among the chattering crowd eating cake and candy instead of better luncheons, and all eying her curiously as she passed.

She was bearing down toward the younger children--her refuge here, as at her uncle’s--when the Hammonds and Flossie Gilsey stopped her.

“Have you forgotten us already, Miss Howe?” called Daisy Hammond.

“No, indeed,” responded Janet, trying to speak easily and cordially. “But please don’t say Miss Howe. It seems so funny among girls like us; my name is Janet.”

“Thanks; it is awfully good of you to let us be intimate right away, and waive all ceremony. Generally we have to wait to use first names,” said Daisy, with an inflection that told Jan, unused as she was to polite disagreeables, that the speech was not meant at its face value. “I heard that your cousin Syd--isn’t he too handsome?--had given you such a nice, funny nickname.”

“Yes; Miss Lochinvar. That’s because I ‘came out of the West,’ you see,” said Janet, instinctively seizing her foe by the horns, so to speak. “It was bright of him, but only too flattering. I don’t expect to make a clean sweep of everything, like Young Lochinvar.” But as she laughed Jan’s heart sank. She was not used to this sort of bad temper, and she hated herself for meeting it while she felt forced to do so; she understood “getting mad,” but not petty spite. And all the while she was saying to herself, “Gladys told them; Gladys has been making game of me.”

But she had crippled her adversary; Daisy did not know how to meet this view of the case, and she glanced slyly at Gladys, who shrugged her shoulders.

“How well you speak German, Miss--Janet!” said Flossie Gilsey. “Isn’t it queer you know it so well, and don’t know French?”

“Not at all queer,” said Janet simply. “I hadn’t much chance to learn French, but there are lots of Germans in Crescendo. Besides, I like it better than French, I’m certain. But the real reason why I know it is because I worked hard to learn it. I meant to be able to speak it; I wanted to be fit to help papa in his office.”

A short silence fell on the little group at this shocking remark, during which Gladys turned a succession of alarming colors, and longed to go into hysterics or choke her cousin--probably both in rapid sequence. Janet Howe, her father’s sister’s child, staying at her house that winter, and brought by her and Gwen to this exclusive school, to announce--shamelessly, brazenly, to announce--that her ambition was to be a clerk in her father’s office, and that for this purpose she had learned German!

Poor Gladys really was to be pitied at that moment, for though she was a little goose to feel so, she really did feel that a disgrace had fallen upon her which death could hardly wipe out. And then the silence was broken by a little titter from the three girls, and Ida Hammond said sarcastically, “How nice!”

Janet looked from Gladys’s party-colored countenance to the amusement gleaming in the eyes of her friends, and saw that something was wrong, but what it could be she had not the faintest idea. And before anything worse could happen a voice behind her said: “Yes, isn’t that nice? Isn’t it lovely? Please introduce me to your cousin, Gladys.”

Janet turned and saw a girl who was in the class with her and Gwen. She was tall, not pretty, but distinguished looking, with that air of good breeding which is so definite, yet so indefinable--the look of one who for many generations had inherited good principles and right standards of living and taste.

“My cousin, Janet Howe, Miss Dorothy Schuyler,” murmured Gladys.

Dorothy put out her hand. “I am so glad to have you here, Janet,” she said. “I was so much interested in what you were saying. There aren’t many girls with enough affection for their fathers to study that they may help them, and few clever enough to do it, even if they do want to. Won’t you tell me about it?”

There was a determined look in the brown eyes that smiled kindly, in spite of it, on Jan, and she knew, though she did not know why, that she was being championed.

“There isn’t very much to tell,” she said slowly, responding in a puzzled way to the other’s cordiality. “My father is in the real-estate business out in the little place I came from--Crescendo. He has to deal a good deal with Germans, and he hasn’t as big a business as he would have in such a growing town if he weren’t working on a patent he wants to bring out. So he needs me--or I liked to think he did--to help him, and he needs some one to speak German, so I tried to combine the two. Like the man in Pickwick who wrote about Chinese metaphysics,” added Jan, with a sudden laugh, and the dimples that made her so irresistibly pretty coming in her cheeks.

Dorothy had a sense of humor, too, and she liked Dickens. She laughed, and put an arm affectionately over the stranger’s shoulder. “I think it is beautiful to find a girl of our age trying to do something loving and sensible like that,” she said heartily. “I hope you can teach me to be brave and unselfish. Wouldn’t you like to come over to that deep window-seat and see the view--it is fine from there--and tell me more about Crescendo? If Gladys can lend you to me a while?” she added interrogatively.

Gladys seemed to think that she could, and the two walked away, followed by glances by no means pleasant from the group they had left. In that first encounter were sown the seeds of future enmity, for the Hammonds and Flossie disliked Janet as much as they would naturally dislike one to whom they had been unkind, and who had thus been the means of making them appear badly in the eyes of Dorothy Schuyler.

When Gwen awakened from her day-dream to a consciousness of her neglect of Janet, she stared in amazement at the sight of her cousin chattering volubly to Dorothy, whose cheeks were red from laughing. Gwen drew a sigh of relief; she saw that Jan was happy, and she knew Dorothy was so innately well-bred that she would never misunderstand any confidences Jan chose to make, as would the other sort of girls.

Walking home at two o’clock, Janet told Gwen the story of her adventures at recess--“recreation hour,” she found that she must learn to call it.

Gwen listened with frowns and smiles. “You will have to learn not to tell that gang”--it is a melancholy fact that the budding author did say “gang”--“anything about home, and being poor. They only draw you out for pure meanness, and they don’t know anything but just money. But wasn’t it fine of Dorothy Schuyler to squelch them like that? Dolly Schuyler is the most a real lady of any girl in that school. She doesn’t put on airs--of course not, if she is a lady--but she makes all the girls feel that what she says and does is the very last, best thing to be said or done. And she leads us all; not because she wants to, but because she is what she is--all the girls look up to her. She wouldn’t stoop to do an underhanded, sneaky, nor a mean thing--not if she got a crown by doing it. She never says nasty things, but when she looks at you--if you’ve been contemptible in any way--you can’t help curling up. I’ve always been very proud that Dorothy seems to like me; she doesn’t like every one. The Hammonds, and that crowd, pretend not to care for what she thinks, because they’re richer than she is, but she is the very concentrated extract of blue blood, and they do care a lot. If there is any aristocracy in America, it’s people like Dorothy’s family.”

“But there isn’t; papa says it is sheer nonsense to talk about aristocracy in a republic,” said Jan, her independence touched.

“All right; I don’t say it isn’t, so don’t wave the Stars and Stripes at me,” said Gwen. “But if there is aristocracy, it must be those people descended from the signers of the Declaration, and the Revolutionary fighters, and the colonists, and all those. Why, you’re descended from them yourself, so you needn’t fire up, Janet Howe.”

“I don’t care; in the West we don’t fuss about trifles. Tell me about Dorothy,” said Janet.

“There isn’t much more to tell, and what there is you’ll find out for yourself. But it was a big thing for Dorothy to champion you. You’ll see that it will make a difference. Both ways,” added Gwen honestly, “for it will make the Hammonds and Floss Gilsey hate you. I wish we could put our heads together to get Gladys away from those girls. I should think she’d know better than to like them, and they’re certain sure to spoil her, if it keeps up.”

“I’m afraid if I put my head into it she would go with them all the more,” said Jan, with a hurt little laugh. “Gladys can’t bear me, Gwen.”

“Gladys is a perfect goose; if she likes such girls as the Hammonds she couldn’t be expected to like you. But just you wait. She’ll come round. Those girls are sure to do something mean to her some day--they’re so jealous of everybody, and I’m proud to say they just hate me. And as to you, nobody could help liking you sooner or later, Jan. You’re a regular dear!” and Gwen kissed her cousin on the front steps, moved with compunction for the neglect which had exposed her to her unpleasant experience at noon, admiration of the generosity which did not resent it, and pride in the little Lochinvar out of the West whom Dorothy Schuyler had sealed with her approval.