The young lady burst out laughing.  “Stop! stop! for mercy’s sake,” she cried.  “You must be somebody that’s been dead and buried and come back to life again.  Why you’re Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat!  You ought to powder your hair and wear patches.”

“We’ve got the oddest girl here,” this young lady wrote home.  “She has n’t read any book that is n’t a thousand years old.  One of the girls says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago.  Her name, she says, is Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle.”

Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few young gentlemen were admitted.  One of these took place about a month after Myrtle had joined the school.  The girls were all in their best, and by and by they were to have a tableau.  Myrtle came out in all her force.  She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome woman of the past generation whom she resembled.  The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the young girl whose position in the school was assured from that moment.  She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which has been given.  There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum:  force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other, if it does not hit or trample on it.

The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the great “swell” among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at the gathering.

“Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara?  By Jove, she’s the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a first-class beauty.  Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara.  If a girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that, I know a good many who had better begin their nap without waiting.  If I were Florence Smythe, I’d try it, and begin now,—­eh, Clara?”

Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own.  A little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the same sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston Jenkins’s repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with a change in the arrangement of the proper names.  The two young ladies were left feeling comparatively comfortable with regard to each other, each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins’s remark about her friend to such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all comfortable with reference to Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered by the leading “swell” of their circle as the most noticeable personage of the assembly.  The individual exception in each case did very well as a matter of politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.