Faith eventually was chosen as hostess and Muriel intently watched every move made by her friend. How graceful she was and how gracious! A slip of a Japanese girl, who was the daughter of the chef of the school, appeared dressed in an attractive native costume and played the part of maid for this class. When she was older she, too, would be trained for the sphere that she was to fill.
That evening Faith found her friend both discouraged and homesick.
“It’s out of place I am among you all,” she said. “I’d ruther be back with my seagulls, I’m thinkin’. I’ll never take to bowin’ and goin’ to teas.”
Faith laughed merrily; then shaking a finger at Rilla, prophesied: “The day is coming when you may be asked to be hostess for a lord or an earl or someone like that; then won’t you be glad that you learned how at High Cliff Seminary?”
The idea was so absurd that even Muriel laughed.
“Me hostess at an earl’s tea party? You’re allays sayin’ you have no imagination, but I’m thinkin’ you have some and to spare.”
Laughter brought a better humor, as it always does, and for an hour that evening Muriel permitted her friend to teach her the first positions to be made in the curtsy.
CHAPTER XXVII. MURIEL BEGINS HER STUDIES.
A fortnight passed and during that time Miss Gordon and Faith had started Muriel’s development in several directions. In fact, the younger of her teachers soon triumphantly announced that not a pupil at High Cliff Seminary could make a more graceful curtsy than Muriel.
The day before the expected arrival of Miss Humphrey, who was to tutor the island girl, she confided to Faith that she just knew that she could make far greater headway with writing and reading if she might continue practicing them with her best friend than she could with a teacher, however learned, who was strange to her. It was evident to the three girls who were her closest comrades that Muriel dreaded the first hour that she was to spend with Miss Humphrey.
As usual, the island girl seemed almost to foreknow what was going to happen, and when the moment arrived Muriel retreated within herself so entirely that, at the close of a very trying hour, Miss Humphrey went down to the office of Miss Gordon and remarked: “I must confess that I am extremely disappointed in your prodigy. Her English is deplorable. To correct it will take indefinite patience and far more time than I can spare from my legitimate classwork. Is there not some one who could undertake her instruction during the fall term in the fundamentals?” If Miss Gordon was discouraged her voice did not betray it, when, after a thoughtful moment, she replied: “I am sorry that I asked you to undertake the tutoring of the island girl. I hoped that you would see in her the possibilities of an unusual nature that I still contend are there, but it will, as you say, require infinite patience to develop them. Perhaps I had better make some other arrangement, at least until Muriel has caught up with your Junior English class.”