Beulah arose, as she said rather impatiently: "Well, Gwyn, just because _you_ do not wish to learn is no reason why Pat and I should follow in your footsteps. I'm going to our own room where I can study uninterrupted."
"I'll go with you." Patricia arose to accompany her friend. "_Au revoir!_"
Gwynette, having found her place, was too absorbed in her story to reply.
Meanwhile Jenny and Lenora were having the happiest kind of time riding down the gently sloping hill, now in the sunlight and again in the shadow of great overhanging trees.
"Has anything pleasant happened since yesterday?" Lenora asked with a side glance at the beaming face of the driver.
"Yes, indeed," the other girl nodded gleefully. "I passed 100 per cent in two subjects and over 90 per cent in all the others."
The brown eyes of her companion were questioning. "Why, I didn't know you were going to have examination. In fact, I didn't know anything about your school. Is there one near or do you have to go to Santa Barbara?"
Jenny told the story of her schooling from its beginning to a most interested listener. "Oh, how I do envy you." Lenora exclaimed. "If I had had a teacher like your Miss Dearborn, I would be wiser than I am. We always lived too far away from a school for me to attend one. Dad has tutored me when he had time and so has Brother during his vacations." Then the girl's face brightened. "But my best teachers have been books themselves. How I have enjoyed them! Dad ordered all of the books in a graded reading course for me, and I have shelf after shelf filled with them around the walls of my room. I especially like nature poetry."
Jenny flashed a bright smile at her companion. "Oh, I am so glad!" she cried. "Miss Dearborn is teaching me to love it. She wants me to be able to quote some poem that will describe every beautiful thing in nature that I see. Of course, I can't always think of one, but then I store the scene away in my memory and ask Miss Dearborn what poem it would suggest to her."
"I would love to know your teacher," Lenora said. "I believe I could learn rapidly if I had her to teach me."
"It's almost the end of the school year," Jenny commented, as she looked up and down the Coast Highway before crossing it, "and, anyway, I suppose it would hardly do for a pupil of the seminary to be taught by someone outside when they have special teachers there for all subjects."