Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/126

116 She was a tail girl and had a great deal of dignity. She told me afterwards that an artist once said to her mother that Maude would have a queenly carriage when she became a woman, so I guess Maude thought she might as well have it now, without waiting. She held her shoulders very straight and her head up, and she was the joy of Miss Simpson, who drilled us in physical culture and tried hard to teach us how to walk. But you know how it is with girls only fifteen. There is always so much to do, and they are so busy and anxious to get from one place to another in a hurry, that they just can't remember the things about keeping your elbows in and your chin on a level with your knees, or whatever it is. Later on, when life becomes less complex, as Maude says, we'll have more time to think of these things and do them. Now I just don't, though Miss Simpson is always stopping me on the campus and telling me about them, and reminding me of how well Miss Joyce walks. It's a wonder our friendship stands the strain. It wouldn't, except for a few things in this story that I'm going to tell you about, if I ever get around to them.

Isn't it funny how much you have to say in literature before you get to your plot? I've just begun my literary career, for I might as well practise on it a little before I leave school, and that is one of the things which has struck me. Sister Perpetua says to go ahead and tell the story, and never mind the rest. That isn't just the way she put it, of course, but that was what she meant. I don't agree with her. I always want to know just how the thing began and all that led up to it. And it seems to me very important indeed that Maude Joyce sat in the back of our classroom an hour before any of us saw her, and a whole morning before we could speak to her, and watched us and studied us all, and with unerring instinct selected me as the nicest girl there. She didn't tell me that for a month, but you may believe I was pleased when she did. It was right after that I began to call her "Maudie."

Then she said another thing. She said, "I'm so glad you have good blood in you, and that your father is a General, and your family is an old one. Such things mean much to me." And she told me that her father was Bishop Joyce, and that her brother was in the regular army, and that her blood was the best in Virginia. She had a way of half closing her eyes and looking at one through the slit, and she did it now, and said, "I couldn't love any one who wasn't a thoroughbred."

I didn't like it very much; it gave me a queer kind of a feeling. I knew I was all right—mercy! mamma and my married sister, Mrs. George R. Verbeck, lead the society in our city. But somehow I thought of the other girls, and especially of Mabel Blossom, who hasn't any family at all and giggles over it, and a strange weight settled on my heart. For, after all, though I may write notes and send flowers to others, only one really sits enshrined, as it were. It is Mabel Blossom I love with all the strength of an ardent nature. So I saw at once that if Maude wasn't nice to Mabel, the little tendrils of my affection for her—Maudie, I mean—which were sending roots deep into my being, would have to be pulled up. However, it came out right enough. Maude was very nice to Mabel, and, in fact, to all the girls. She said she didn't mind about acquaintances or ordinary friends. It was her intimates who must be well-bred; those she chose from all the world—those who came into the circle of her life which she was always talking about.

The girls said, and I began to be afraid myself, that Maude Joyce was a snob. She talked that way, and it really looked so. As time went on it worried me a great deal, for in other things she was fine, and each day revealed hitherto unsuspected beauties of character and temperament, as real writers say. She was the most generous girl I ever knew, and the soul of truth and honor. If Maude Joyce said anything was so, I learned to take it as if it came from the Bible, and all the girls, even those who didn't like her, did the same. Then she had one of those grandly intense natures and wasn't afraid to show her feelings. She was lovely about that. If she cared for you she said so, and wasn't ashamed of it. Besides, she was so clever! She was the star pupil, and took all the prizes at Com-