Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial321dodg).pdf/67

Rh you drop it and fall into your old ways with your old cronies, and discover how “awfully fond” of one another you are, and what a grand good time you re going to have all the year. You stop being Good Samaritans by the roadside, and climb up into your same old tally-ho,—the same old crowd,—and go bowling off; and, to prolong the metaphorical agony, those of the new girls who have n’t the gumption either to hang on somehow to your tally-ho, or to club together and make a clique or a tally-ho of their own—why, they just have to foot it by themselves, that ’s all—and I suppose it is lonesome.

Well, by Thanksgiving of last year we were all, new girls and old ones, pretty well shaken down into our proper places. Everybody knew what everybody else was like. New girls who had hated one another the first week were now in a state of intimate intertwinement, or the reverse, Girls we ’d thought dull at first turned out to be stars, and vice versa. All the clubs had initiated all their new members. In the evenings and Sunday afternoons everybody had been talked over and labeled.

Judy and I were in the midst of such a discussion one night when we suddenly discovered that there was one girl in school that no one knew, or knew anything about. It was that night we first called Natalie Prentiss “Little X,” and the name took with everybody. Natalie Prentiss was an unknown quantity. We did n’t know anything about her family or her hone or her past. She had n’t a friend in school. She sat by herself in the hall or the drawing-room; she walked by herself, and she ate in silence and oblivion, no matter how much fun was going on at the table. Cassandra treated her as Cass always treats her room-mates. She had five year before last, She hugs them to bits the first three days, goes around telling everybody how perfectly charming they are, gazes at them all through the painful separation at meal-time, and at the end of three days turns right around and hates them with a deadly hatred, and they live unhappily after. The only difference in Natalie’s case was that Cass did not do the hugging, in the first place—you could n’t have hugged Natalie. Cass published about freely what she thought of Little X, but not a