A very tall, astonishingly lank girl was standing in the doorway, feet apart, and hands clasped behind her back, regarding them amiably through a pair of enormous, bone-rimmed goggles. Every now and again, she would blink her eyes, and screw up her face comically, while she continued to smile, showing a set of teeth as large and white as pebbles.
"You were saying something about being expelled. Are you expelled already? _Ex plus pello, pellere pulsi pulsum_--meaning to push out, or, as we say in the vernacular, to kick out, fire, bounce. Miss Drinkwater likes us to note the Latin derivations of all our English words, and I've got the habit. You two seem to be lachrymosus, or blue--by which I take it that you are new girls. I sympathize with you, although I am an ancient. Two years ago this very night, I wept so hard that I nearly gave my roommate pneumonia from the dampness. How-do-you-do?" With this unconventional preliminary, accompanied by one of the friendliest and most disarming grins imaginable, the newcomer marched over to the bed and shook hands vigorously.
"My name is Charlotte Lucretia Adela Spencer. Really it is. You must take my word for it. But I only use the 'Charlotte.' The others I keep in case of emergency. I room next door, with Mildred Lloyd--who, incidentally, is a perfect lady, while _I_ am not. I was born in the year 1903, in the city of Denver, Colorado--but of that, more anon. It's tremendously interesting, but if _you_--is your name Alma?--if you don't get your coiffure coifed, you'll miss out on our evening repast. Wiggle, my dear, wiggle!"
Thus urged, Alma "wiggled" accordingly; and while she carefully washed her tear-stained face, and put up her hair, their visitor, sprawling across the bed, kept up a running fire of ridiculous remarks, all uttered in her peculiar, dry, drawling voice, and punctuated with the oddest facial contortions. Yet, in spite of her nonsense, there was very evidently a good deal of real sense, and the kindest feeling behind it, and her singular face, too unusual to be called either plain or pretty, beamed with satisfaction when she had won a genuine peal of laughter from the two dejected Prescotts.
"We'd better go down now. To-night of course everything is more or less topsy-turvy. My trunk, I think, must be still out in Kokomo, Indiana, or some such place. I don't even expect to see it for another month or so. But _I_ don't mind. I'm a regular child of nature anyway--it's just Amelia who's pernickety about our appearing in full regalia every night for dinner. Amelia is Leland, of course. She's tremendously keen on preserving a refining influence about the school, and I think she looks on me as a rather demoralizing factor. There goes the gong."