Adelle Clark presented to the little world of Herndon Hall a very vulnerable appearance when she arrived at the school on that Friday evening. She was still wearing the blue serge school dress that she and her aunt had made for her high-school début, also some coarse, faded brown stockings, and stout cheap shoes, not to mention an unmentionable hat of no style at all. She had taken that unfortunate joke of the trust company's president literally: she must not waste her substance upon clothes. Even without this inhibition she had scarcely the skill and the courage necessary to spend her two hundred dollars to advantage in three days. So she had bought herself a trunk, a few suits of much-needed heavy underwear, some handkerchiefs, and a coat that she had desired all winter, a thick, clumsy affair that completely enveloped her slight figure. Then her imagination of wants had given out.
The young teacher, who had taken Miss Thompson's place because of a sudden indisposition that attacked the head mistress, had made Adelle uncomfortably aware that something was wrong, but she put down her coolness and unsympathetic silence during their brief journey to the fact that Miss Stevens was a "teacher" and therefore felt "superior," "Rosy," as the older Hall girls called Miss Stevens, was not at all "superior" in her attitude to the girls. She dressed quite smartly and youthfully and was their best confidante. But she had received a shock when she saw "that little fright" (as she reported to Miss Thompson) timidly sitting on the edge of her chair in the parlor of the Eclair Hotel. "Where can she come from?" she had said to herself; and later she had supplemented this query by thinking, "wherever it was, she had better go back to it as fast as she can--the little fright!"
Fortunately Adelle did not understand the glances that the elegant young women who were chattering in the Hall drawing-room before dinner cast upon her when she was introduced to her schoolmates. Nor did she immediately comprehend the intention of the insults and tortures to which she was submitted during the ensuing year. She felt lonely: she missed her aunt and even the "roomers" more than she had expected to. But gradually even into her dumb mind there penetrated a sense of undeserved ignominy, not clearly localized, because she did not possess a sufficient knowledge of sophisticated manners to realize the refined nature of her torture. She had merely an accumulating sense of pain and outrage. She was not happy in Herndon Hall: she did not know it until afterwards, but that was the plain truth. Nobody wanted her there, and she knew enough to understand it. Even a cat or a dog has sufficient social sense for that!