"I'll let you play my ukulele," offered Constance eagerly.

"Let me. She doesn't know a ukulele from a music box," said Bobby, with sisterly frankness. "Come on, girls, let's go up and see our rooms."

They tramped up the broad staircase and crossed one of the bridges to find themselves in a delightful, sunny building with corridors carpeted in softest green. The rooms apparently were all connecting, and the teacher who met them said the eight friends might have adjoining rooms as long as "they gave no trouble."

"I'm your corridor teacher, Miss Lacey," she explained.

"Let's be glad she isn't the one we saw on the train," whispered the irrepressible Bobby, as they all trooped into the first room.

CHAPTER XI

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It was soon settled that Betty and Bobby were to have the center room in a suite of three and Libbie and Frances should be on one side of them, and Louise and Constance Howard on the other. There was a perfectly appointed bathroom opening off the center room which the six were to share. Norma and Alice Guerin were given a room that adjoined that occupied by Libbie and Frances, but nominally, Miss Lacey explained, they would be considered as a unit in the next suite of three connecting rooms. Fortunately two very friendly, quiet girls drew the room immediately next to the Guerin girls.

"But, Betty, listen," whispered Norma Guerin, drawing Betty aside as a great b.u.mping and banging announced the arrival of the trunks. "Who do you suppose has the room next to the Bennett sisters? Ada Nansen and Ruth Gladys Royal!"

"You are in hard luck!" commented Bobby, who had overheard, as she danced off to open the door to the grinning expressman.

"All the porters are busy!" the man explained.

"So I just told 'em Tim McCarthy wasn't one to stand by and let work go undone. Where would ye be wantin' these little bags put now?"

He had a trunk on his back that, as Bobby afterward remarked to Betty, "would have done for an elephant."

"Girls, whose trunk is this?" demanded Bobby.

"Not mine!" came like a well-drilled chorus.

"'Miss Ada Nansen,'" read Betty, examining the card. "Bobby, that's one of the five!"

They directed the perspiring expressman to the right door and, it is to be regretted, shamelessly peeped while he toiled up and down bringing the five trunks and three hat boxes. Then he began on the baggage consigned to Ruth Gladys Royal, and the watchers counted three trunks.

Betty looked at the Guerin girls and laughed.

"Eight trunks!" she gasped. "They can't get that number in one room.

Not and have any room for the furniture. Norma, do go and see what you can see."

Norma sped away, and returned as speedily, her eyes blazing.

"What do you think?" she demanded furiously. "They've had some of 'em put in our room, three I counted, and two in the Bennett girls' room. They're as mad as hops!"

"The Bennett girls are my friends," declared Bobby Littell sententiously.

"I only hope they're mad enough to hop right down to the office and explain the state of things."

But the luncheon gong sounded just then, and a laughing, colorful throng of femininity swept down the broad stairs to the dining room.

"How lovely!" said Betty involuntarily.

There were no long tables in the large, airy room. Instead, round tables that seated from six to eight, each daintily set and with a slender vase of flowers in the center of each. Betty and Bobby had the same thought at the same moment.

"If we could only sit together, all of us!" their eyes telegraphed.

"They're all taking the tables they want and standing by the chairs,"

whispered Betty. "Let's do that."

A table set for eight was close to the door. Betty, Bobby, Louise, Frances, Libbie, Constance, Norma and Alice gently surrounded this and stood quietly behind the chairs.

Some one, somewhere, gave a signal, and the roomful was seated as if by magic.

"I see--those four tables over by the window are for the teachers,"

whispered Betty. "I see Miss Anderson and Miss Lacey, and that white-haired woman must be the princ.i.p.al. Yes, and girls, there's that woman whom the boys tormented so on the train!"

Sure enough, there she was, looking even more severe now that her hat was removed and her sharp features were unrelieved.

"If this isn't fun! I'm sorry for poor Esther at Miss Graham's,"

said Bobby, looking about her with delight. "Mercy, what do you suppose this is?"

One of the young clerks from the office approached the table, a large cardboard sheet in her hand.

"I'm filling in the diagram," she explained. "You mustn't change your seats without permission. Tell me your names, and I'll put you down in the right s.p.a.ces."

Betty looked over her shoulder as she wrote down their names. Like the diagram of the seating s.p.a.ce of a theatre, the tables and chairs were plainly marked. Betty swiftly calculated that between one hundred and twenty-five and one hundred and fifty girls must be seated in the room.

Later she learned that the total enrollment was one hundred and sixty.

Just outside the dining room was a large bulletin board, impossible to ignore or overlook. When they came out from luncheon a notice was posted that Mrs. Eustice would address the school at two o'clock in the a.s.sembly hall in the main building. It was now one-thirty.

"Let's go look at the gym," suggested Bobby. "We have time. Oh, how do you do?"--this last was apparently jerked out of her.

"I didn't know you were coming to Shadyside, Bobby," said Ruth Gladys Royal effusively. "Do you know my chum, Ada Nansen? She's from San Francisco."

"Constance Howard is from the West, too--the Presidio," said Bobby.

Gracefully she introduced the others to Ada and Ruth who surveyed them indifferently. The Littell girls they knew were wealthy and had a place in Washington society, but the rest were not yet cla.s.sified.

"Haven't I seen you before?" Ada languidly questioned Betty. "You're not the little waitress--Oh, how stupid of me! I was thinking of a girl who looked enough like you to be your sister."

Bobby bristled indignantly, but Betty struggled with laughter.

"I remember you," she said clearly. "You had the wrong seat on the train from Oklahoma."

Ada Nansen glanced at her with positive dislike.

"I don't recall," she said icily. "However, I've traveled so much I daresay many incidents slip my mind. Well, Gladys, let's go in and get good seats. I want to hear Mrs. Eustice; they say she is a direct descendant of Richard Carvel."