“Take it,” said the New York girl.  “There ’s tew York shill’ns in it when I hand it to you.”

“Your whole quarter’s allowance, I bullieve,—­ain’t it?” said the Boston girl.

“Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will be strictly attended to in this institution.  The most correct standards of pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example.  It will be the special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils out of all provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-bred English scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity.”—­Extract from the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste’s Boarding-school.

Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls.  Striking, they all agreed, but then the criticisms began.  Many of the girls chattered a little broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had been half educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which are to social operators what his cutting instruments are to the surgeon.  Her face she allowed was handsome; but her style, according to this oracle, was a little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly comme il faut.  More specifically, she was guilty of contours fortement prononces,—­corsage de paysanne,—­quelque chose de sauvage, etc., etc.  This girl prided herself on her figure.

Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of Myrtle’s face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy girl’s.

The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live freshman.  She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as they could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of a queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or two would make her a belle of the first water.  She had that air of indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community.  On the other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play; and the modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some hundreds of people, considered her as rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden dust of the great city markets.

She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets.  She came with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over the heads of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists.  She learned, therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced instructors.  Her somewhat rude sketching soon began to show something of the artist’s touch.  Her voice, which