For a while after Cynthia’s introduction to the school she was calmly ignored by many of the young ladies there, and once openly—­snubbed, to use the word in its most disagreeable sense.  Not that she gave any of them any real cause to snub her.  She did not intrude her own affairs upon them, but she was used to conversing kindly with the people about her as equals, and for this offence; on the third day, Miss Sally Broke snubbed her.  It is hard not to make a heroine of Cynthia, not to be able to relate that she instantly put Miss Sally’s nose out of joint.  Susan Merrill tried to do that, and failed signally, for Miss Sally’s nose was not easily dislodged.  Susan fought more than one of Cynthia’s battles.  As a matter of fact, Cynthia did not know that she had been affronted until that evening.  She did not tell her friends how she spent the night yearning fiercely for Coniston and Uncle Jethro, at times weeping for them, if the truth be told; how she had risen before the dawn to write a letter, and to lay some things in the rawhide trunk.  The letter was never sent, and the packing never finished.  Uncle Jethro wished her to stay and to learn to be a lady, and stay she would, in spite of Miss Broke and the rest of them.  She went to school the next day, and for many days and weeks thereafter, and held communion with the few alone who chose to treat her pleasantly.  Unquestionably this is making a heroine of Cynthia.

If young men are cruel in their schools, what shall be written of young women?  It would be better to say that both are thoughtless.  Miss Sally Broke, strange as it may seem, had a heart, and many of the other young ladies whose fathers sailed for Europe and owned picture galleries; but these young ladies were absorbed, especially after vacation, in affairs of which a girl from Coniston had no part.  Their friends were not her friends, their amusements not her amusements, and their talk not her talk.  But Cynthia watched them, as was her duty, and gradually absorbed many things which are useful if not essential—­outward observances of which the world takes cognizance, and which she had been sent there by Uncle Jethro to learn.  Young people of Cynthia’s type and nationality are the most adaptable in the world.

Before the December snows set in Cynthia had made one firm friend, at least, in Boston; outside of the Merrill family.  That friend was Miss Lucretia Penniman, editress of the Woman’s Hour.  Miss Lucretia lived in the queerest and quaintest of the little houses tucked away under the hill, with the back door a story higher than the fronts an arrangement which in summer enabled the mistress to walk out of her sitting-room windows into a little walled garden.  In winter that sitting room was the sunniest, cosiest room in the city, and Cynthia spent many hours there, reading or listening to the wisdom that fell from the lips of Miss Lucretia or her guests.  The sitting room had uneven, yellow-white panelling that fairly shone with enamel, mahogany bookcases filled with authors who had chosen to comply with Miss Lucretia’s somewhat rigorous censorship; there was a table laden with such magazines as had to do with the uplifting of a sex, a delightful wavy floor covered with a rose carpet; and, needless to add, not a pin or a pair of scissors out of place in the whole apartment.