For the Sake of the School | Page 7

Ulyth entered, for she had a shrewd suspicion of what she was about to hear.
"Please, Miss Bowes, I'm sorry to have to ask a favour, but may Rona be changed into another dormitory?"
"Why, Ulyth, you wrote to me specially and asked if you might have her for a room-mate!"
"Yes, I did; but I hadn't seen her then. I thought she'd be so different."
"Isn't it a little too soon to judge? You haven't known her twenty-four hours yet."
"I know as much of her as I ever want to. Oh, Miss Bowes, she's dreadful! I'll never like her. I can't have her in my room--I simply can't!"
There was a shake, suggestive of tears, in Ulyth's voice. Her eyes looked heavy, as if she had not slept. Miss Bowes sighed again.
"Rona mayn't be exactly what you imagined, but you must remember in what different circumstances she has been brought up. I think she has many good qualities, and that she'll soon improve. Now let us look at the matter from her point of view. You have been writing to her constantly for two years. She has come here specially to be near you. You are her only friend in a new and strange country where she is many thousand miles away from her own home. You gave her a cordial invitation to England, and now, because she does not happen to realize your quite unfounded expectations, you want to back out of all your obligations to her. I thought you were a girl, Ulyth, who kept her promises."
Ulyth fingered the corner of the tablecloth nervously for a moment, then she burst out:
"I can't, Miss Bowes, I simply can't. If you knew how she grates upon me! Oh, it's too much! I'd rather have a bear cub or a monkey for a room-mate! Please, please don't make us stop together! If you won't move her, move me! I'd sleep in an attic if I could have it to myself."
"You must stay where you are until the end of the week. You owe that to Rona, at any rate. Afterwards I shall not force you, but leave it to your own good feeling. I want you to think over what I have been saying. You can come on Sunday morning and tell me your decision."
"I know what the answer will be," murmured Ulyth, as she went from the room.
She was very angry with Miss Bowes, with Rona, and with herself for her own folly.
"It's ridiculous to expect me to take up this savage," she argued. "And too bad of Miss Bowes to make out that I'm breaking my word. Oh dear! what am I to write home to Mother? How can I tell her? I believe I'll just send her a picture post card, and only say Rona has come, and no more. Miss Bowes has no right to coerce me. I'll make my own friends. No, I've quite made up my mind she shan't cram Rona down my throat. To have that awful girl eternally in my bedroom--I should die!"
After all her heroics it was a terrible come-down for poor Ulyth now the actual had taken the place of the sentimental. Her class-mates could not forbear teasing her a little. It was too bad of them; but then they had resented her entire pre-appropriation of the new-comer, and, moreover, had one or two old scores from last term to pay off. Ulyth began to detest the very name of "the Prairie Flower". She wondered how she could ever have been so silly.
"I ought to have been warned," she thought, trying to throw the blame on to somebody else. "No one ever suggested she'd be like this. The editor of the magazine really shouldn't have persuaded us to write. It's all his fault in the beginning."
Though the rest of the girls were scarcely impressed with Rona's personality, they were not utterly repelled.
"She's rather pretty," ventured Lizzie Lonsdale. "Her eyes are the bluest I've ever seen."
"And her teeth are so white and even," added Beth Broadway. "She looks jolly when she smiles."
"Perhaps she'll smarten up soon," suggested Addie Knighton. "That blue dress suits her; it just matches her eyes."
To Ulyth's fastidious taste Rona's clothes looked hopelessly ill-cut and colonial, especially as her room-mate put them on anyhow, and seemed to have no regard at all for appearances. A girl who did not mind whether she looked really trim, spruce and smart, must indeed have spent her life in the backwoods.
"Didn't you even have a governess in New Zealand?" she ventured one day. She did not encourage Rona to talk, but for once her curiosity overcame her dislike of the high-pitched voice.
"Couldn't get one to stop up-country, where we were. Mrs. Barker, our cowman's wife, looked after me ever since Mother died. She was the only woman