Just Patty | Page 7

little worldling
lost her consciousness of calls outside of "bounds," and surrendered to

the spirit of the youthful sisterhood.
But the girls in their teens answer readily to the call of ROMANCE.
And occasionally, in the twilight hour between afternoon study and the
dressing bell, as they gathered in the window-seat with faces to the
western sky, the talk would turn to the future--particularly when
Rosalie Patton was of the group. Pretty, dainty, inconsequential little
Rosalie was preëminently fashioned for romance; it clung to her golden
hair and looked from her eyes. She might be extremely hazy as to the
difference between participles and supines, she might hesitate on her
definition of a parallelopiped, but when the subject under discussion
was one of sentiment, she spoke with conviction. For hers was no mere
theoretical knowledge; it was gained by personal experience. Rosalie
had been proposed to!
She confided the details to her most intimate friends, and they confided
them to their most intimate friends, until finally, the whole school knew
the entire romantic history.
Rosalie's preëminence in the field of sentiment was held entirely fitting.
Priscilla might excel in basket-ball, Conny Wilder in dramatics, Keren
Hersey in geometry and Patty Wyatt in--well, in impudence and
audacity--but Rosalie was the recognized authority in matters of the
heart; and until Mae Mertelle Van Arsdale came, nobody thought of
questioning her position.
Mae Mertelle spent an uncomfortable month shaking into place in the
school life. The point in which she was accustomed to excel was
clothes, but when she and her four trunks arrived, she found to her
disgust that clothes were not useful at St. Ursula's. The school uniform
reduced all to a dead level in the matter of fashion. There was another
field, however, in which she might hope for supremacy. Her own
sentimental history was vivid, compared to the colorless lives of most,
and she proceeded to assert her claims.
One Saturday evening in October, half-a-dozen girls were gathered in
Rosalie's room, on piled-up sofa cushions, with the gas turned low and
the light of the hunter's moon streaming through the window. They had

been singing softly in a minor key, but gradually the singing turned to
talk. The talk, in accordance with the moonlight and flying clouds, was
in a sentimental vein; and it ended, naturally, with Rosalie's Great
Experience. Between maidenly hesitations and many promptings she
retold the story--the new girls had never heard it, and to the old girls it
was always new.
The stage setting had been perfect--a moonlit beach, and lapping waves
and rustling pine trees. When Rosalie chanced to omit any detail, her
hearers, already familiar with the story, eagerly supplied it.
"And he held your hand all the time he was talking," Priscilla
prompted.
"Oh, Rosalie! Did he?" in a shocked chorus from the newcomers.
"Y--yes. He just sort of took hold of it and forgot to let go, and I didn't
like to remind him."
"What did he say?"
"He said he couldn't live without me."
"And what did you say?"
"I said I was awfully sorry, but he'd have to."
"And then what happened?"
"Nothing happened," she was obliged to confess. "I s'pose something
might have happened if I'd accepted him, but you see, I didn't."
"But you were very young at the time," suggested Evalina Smith. "Are
you sure you knew your own mind?"
Rosalie nodded with an air of melancholy regret.
"Yes. I knew I couldn't ever love him, because, he--well, he had an
awfully funny nose. It started to point in one direction, and then

changed its mind and pointed in the other."
Her hearers would have preferred that she had omitted this detail; but
Rosalie was literal-minded and lacked the story-teller's instinct for
suppression.
"He asked if there wasn't any hope that I would change," she added
pensively. "I told him that I could never love him enough to marry him,
but that I would always respect him."
"And then what did he say?"
"He said he wouldn't commit suicide."
A profound hush followed, while Rosalie gazed at the moon and the
others gazed at Rosalie. With her gleaming hair and violet eyes, she
was entirely their ideal of a storybook heroine. They did not think of
envying her; they merely wondered and admired. She was crowned by
natural right, Queen of Romance.
Mae Van Arsdale, who had listened in silence to the recital, was the
first to break the spell. She rose, fluffed up her hair, straightened her
blouse, and politely suppressed a yawn.
"Nonsense, Rosalie! You're a silly little goose to make such a fuss over
nothing.--Good-night, children. I'm going to bed now."
She sauntered toward the door, but paused on the threshold to drop the
casual statement. "I've been proposed to three times."
A shocked gasp arose