Just Patty | Page 8

from the circle at this lèse-majesté. The
disdainful condescension of a new girl was more than they could brook.
"She's a horrid old thing, and I don't believe a word she says!" Priscilla
declared stoutly, as she kissed poor crushed little Rosalie goodnight.
This slight contretemps marked the beginning of strained relations.
Mae Mertelle gathered her own adherents, and Rosalie's special coterie
of friends rallied to the standard of their queen. They intimated to

Mae's followers that the quality of the romance was quite different in
the two cases. Mae might be the heroine of any number of
commonplace flirtations, but Rosalie was the victim of a grande
passion. She was marked with an indelible scar that she would carry to
the grave. In the heat of their allegiance, they overlooked the
crookedness of the hero's nose and the avowed fact that Rosalie's own
affections had not been engaged.
But Mae's trump card had been withheld. Whispers presently spread
about under the seal of confidence. She was hopelessly in love. It was
not a matter of the past vacation, but of the burning present. Her
room-mate wakened in the night to hear her sobbing to herself. She had
no appetite--her whole table could testify to that. In the middle of
dessert, even on ice-cream nights, she would forget to eat, and with her
spoon half-raised, would sit staring into space. When reminded that she
was at the table, she would start guiltily and hastily bolt the rest of the
meal. Her enemies unkindly commented upon the fact that she always
came to before the end, so she got as much as anybody else.
The English classes at St. Ursula's were weekly drilled in the
old-fashioned art of letter writing. The girls wrote letters home,
minutely descriptive of school life. They addressed imaginary girl
friends, and grandmothers and college brothers and baby sisters. They
were learning the great secret of literary forcefulness--to suit their style
to their audience. Ultimately, they arrived at the point of thanking
imaginary young men for imaginary flowers. Mae listened to the
somewhat stilted phraseology of these polite and proper notes with a
supercilious smile. The class, covertly regarding her, thrilled anew.
Gradually, the details of the romance spread abroad. The man was
English--Mae had met him on the steamer--and some day when his
elder brother died (the brother was suffering from an incurable malady
that would carry him off in a few years) he would come into the title;
though just what the title was, Mae had not specifically stated. But in
any case, her father was a staunch American; he hated the English and
he hated titles. No daughter of his should ever marry a foreigner. If she
did, she would never receive a dollar from him. However, neither Mae

nor Cuthbert cared about the money. Cuthbert had plenty of his own.
His name was Cuthbert St. John. (Pronounced Sinjun.) He had four
names in all, but those were the two he used the most. He was in
England now, having been summoned by cable, owing to the critical
condition of his brother's health, but the crisis was past, and Cuthbert
would soon be returning. Then--Mae closed her lips in a straight line
and stared defiantly into space. Her father should see!
Before the throbbing reality of this romance, Rosalie's poor little
history paled into nothing.
Then the plot began to thicken. Studying the lists of incoming steamers,
Mae announced to her room-mate that he had landed. He had given his
word to her father not to write; but she knew that in some way she
should hear. And sure enough! The following morning brought a
nameless bunch of violets. There had been doubters before--but at this
tangible proof of devotion, skepticism crumbled.
Mae wore her violets to church on Sunday. The school mixed its
responses in a shocking fashion--nobody pretended to follow the
service; all eyes were fixed on Mae's upturned face and far-off smile.
Patty Wyatt pointed out that Mae had taken special pains to seat herself
in the light of a stained-glass window, and that occasionally the rapt
eyes scanned the faces of her companions, to make sure that the effect
was reaching across the footlights. But Patty's insinuation was
indignantly repudiated by the school.
Mae was at last triumphantly secure in the rôle of leading lady. Poor
insipid Rosalie no longer had a speaking part.
The affair ran on for several weeks, gathering momentum as it moved.
In the European Travel Class that met on Monday nights, "English
Country Seats" was the subject of one of the talks, illustrated by the
stereopticon. As a stately, terraced mansion, with deer cropping grass in
the foreground, was thrown upon the screen, Mae Mertelle suddenly
grew faint. She vouchsafed no reason to the housekeeper who came