The hunter’s horn on the terrace outside, sounding the call to recreation, roused her from her day-dreams, and she came to herself with a start.  But before she hurried away to the office where the mail was being distributed, she made a quick survey of the H’s.  To her surprise the name of Hurst was not among them.  She fairly ran down the stairs to report her discovery to Elise.

When the invitations for the evening were all distributed Mary went up stairs wailing out her consternation to A.O.  She was to be escorted by Jane Ridgeway, the most dignified senior in the school.

“She’s the kind that knows such an awful lot, and you have to be on your p’s and q’s with her every single minute.  Cornie says her father is in the Cabinet, and her mother is a shining intellectual light.  And now that I’ve been warned beforehand, I’ll not be able to utter a syllable of sense; I know that I’ll just gibber.”

When she went to her room to dress for the occasion that night there was a great hunch of hot-house roses waiting for her with Jane’s card.  She knew from the other girls’ description of this opening festivity that the seniors spared no expense on this occasion, but it rather overawed her to receive such an extravagant offering.  She looked across at the modest bunch of white and purple violets which had come from the Warwick Hall conservatory for Ethelinda, and wondered if there had not been some mistake.  Then to her surprise, Ethelinda, who had noticed her glance, spoke to her.

“Sweet, aren’t they!  Miss Berkeley sent them, or rather Lady Evelyn, I should say.  She is to be my escort to-night.”

It was Mary’s besetting sin to put people right whom, she thought were mistaken, so she answered hastily, “Oh, no!  You oughtn’t to call her Lady Evelyn.  She doesn’t like it.  She wants to be just like the other girls as long as she is in an American school.”

Ethelinda drew herself up with a stare, and asked in a patronizing tone that nettled Mary: 

“May I ask how you happen to know so much about her?”

Equally lofty in her manner, and in a tone comically like Ethelinda’s, Mary answered, “You may.  Miss Lewis gave me that bit of information, and for the rest I looked her up in Burke’s Peerage.  She comes of a very illustrious and noble family, so of course she feels perfectly sure of her position, and doesn’t have to draw the lines about herself to preserve her dignity as some people do.  Cornie Dean was telling me about a girl who was in the school last year who made such a fuss about her pedigree that she couldn’t be friends with more than three of the girls.  The rest weren’t high enough caste for her.  She sported a crest and all that, and they found out that she hadn’t a particle of right to it.  Her father had struck it rich in some lumber deal, and bought a gallery of ancestral portraits, and paid a man a small fortune to fix him up a coat of arms.  She had no end of money, but she wasn’t the real thing, and Cornie says that paste diamonds won’t go down with this school.  They can spot them every time.”