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

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! Papa? 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 wasn't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?--But you've got some new pictures and things, haven't you? Who furnished your parlors?"
"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."
"Stuff and nonsense. I don't believe it. What color are your carriage-horses?"
"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but a cow."
"Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."
Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if she had