Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1887 | Page 9

connections, it is true, so far as they
could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of a queen,
and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or two would
make her a belle of the first water. She had that air of indifference to
their little looks and whispered comments which is surest to disarm all
the critics of a small tattling community. On the other hand, she came
to this school to learn, and not to play; and the modest and more plainly
dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep
victualling establishments for some hundreds of people, considered her
as rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters of the
rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling over
each other in the golden dust of the great city markets.
She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets. She came
with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply
them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over the heads
of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists. She learned,
therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced instructors. Her
somewhat rude sketching soon began to show something of the artist's
touch. Her voice, which had only been taught to warble the simplest
melodies, after a little training began to show its force and sweetness
and flexibility in the airs that enchant drawing-room audiences. She
caught with great readiness the manner of the easiest girls,
unconsciously, for she inherited old social instincts which became
nature with the briefest exercise. Not much license of dress was
allowed in the educational establishment of Madam Delacoste, but
every girl had an opportunity to show her taste within the conventional

limits prescribed. And Myrtle soon began to challenge remark by a
certain air she contrived to give her dresses, and the skill with which
she blended their colors.
"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
Planet Hotel, "she's got style, lots of it. I call her perfectly splendid,
when she's got up in her swell clothes. That oriole's wing she wears in
her bonnet makes her look gorgeous,--she'll be a stunning Pocahontas
for the next tableau."
Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only
merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from,
thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken in
hand in good season. So it came about that, before many weeks had
passed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment, she
might be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the whole
bevy of them. The studious ones admired her for her facility of learning,
and her extraordinary appetite for every form of instruction, and the
showy girls, who were only enduring school as the purgatory that
opened into the celestial world of society, recognized in her a very
handsome young person, who would be like to make a sensation sooner
or later.
There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted
her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe.
"We keep nine and a pony for Edgar."
Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep
any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an
acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an
ex-bonnet-maker) that the school was getting common, she was
afraid,--they were letting in persons one knew nothing about.
Miss Clara Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate

used in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just
bought a complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a
good deal of china at her own home,--old china, which had been a
hundred years in the family, some of it.
"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clara Browne. "What
queer-looking stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as
new and bright! Papaä had all our pictures painted on purpose for us.
Have you got any handsome pictures in your house?"
"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said,
"some of them older than the china."
"How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?"
"One was a great beauty in her time."
"How jolly!"
"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her
religion,--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."
"How very very wicked! It