THE MOTOR MAIDS’ SCHOOL DAYS

CHAPTER I.—“THE COMET.”

“Girls, in about ten minutes you’re going to have the surprise of your lives,” cried Nancy Brown, joining a group of her friends at the High School gate.

“What is it, Nancy? Do tell us, please,” cried half a dozen voices at once.

“No, you must wait,” answered Nancy. “If I told you what it was, I wouldn’t enjoy seeing your faces when the thing happened.”

“Nancy, you have always got some mystery on foot,” put in her most intimate friend, Elinor Butler. “Is this one animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Fine or superfine?”

“Can it speak?”

“Is it as large as a house?”

“Don’t all talk at once,” exclaimed Nancy. “I’ll tell you this much. It’s animal and it’s superfine. And”—she wrinkled her brows—“and it’s mineral, too, I suppose.”

“Superfine? At least it’s a woman, then?” cried all the girls in a chorus.

“Yes,” laughed Nancy, who loved nothing better than to excite the curiosity of her friends to the utmost and then launch a genuine sensation into their midst.

“Does the superfine animal wear the mineral?” demanded Elinor.

“No, she doesn’t wear it. She’s in it.”

“In it? How strange,” exclaimed another girl. “Perhaps it’s a lady oyster in her shell.”

“There’s no surprise in an oyster unless there’s a pearl in it, goosey,” teased Nancy. “But here it comes! Here it comes!” she cried, clapping her hands joyfully, while six pairs of eyes peered curiously down the street, which, by gentle degrees, became a country road. The trim sidewalks of the little seaport town of West Haven became grassy paths and the pretty lawns broadened into flat green meadows.

Far down the road a brilliant red object could be seen approaching. It was enveloped in a cloud of dust and it moved with great rapidity.

“Why, it’s nothing but a red automobile,” cried Elinor, in disappointment.

“Yes,” admitted Nancy, “it’s an automobile, but there’s something unusual about it besides its color.”

“A girl is running it,” announced Mary Price, whose clear, dark eyes always seemed to be looking into the distance. “A girl is running it, and no one is with her, and——”

But the motor car was now in full view. It was a graceful little machine large enough to hold five or six people comfortably, its body painted a warm and pleasing shade of red, its cushions upholstered in a slightly darker shade which harmonized perfectly with the red of the body. A young girl, sitting on the front seat, was running the car as easily and steadily as an experienced chauffeur. Making a graceful curve, she turned into the driveway which led to the school grounds and presently drew up under a large shed, where people were in the habit of hitching their horses and vehicles on Field Day, or when football was in season.

“Who is she?” demanded Nancy’s schoolmates in a whisper.

“Why, she’s Miss Helen Campbell’s cousin, Wilhelmina Campbell.”

“Do you mean our old friend, Billie?” asked Elinor.

“The same,” said Nancy, in a low voice, for Billie Campbell was now approaching within hearing distance. “Her mother’s dead and her father’s brought her here to live with Miss Campbell while he builds a railroad in Russia, and she’s going to High School and she’s in our class and she’s coming to and fro every day in her own motor car.”

Nancy was speaking as rapidly as a talking machine going at full speed.

Billie, as her father had always called her, might have guessed that she was the subject of all this buzzing undertone of conversation among the school girls; but she was too well accustomed to strange faces and new places to feel stiff and shy now at the looks of curiosity which were turned on her. On the contrary, the West Haven girls themselves felt a little ill at ease and countrified in the presence of this new sophomore, who, with her father, an engineer, had lived in many countries and seen a great deal of that mysterious outside world which sleepy, quiet West Haven had never troubled itself much about.

But Billie Campbell was not destined to renew her acquaintance just then with these childhood friends of hers. A slender, very pretty girl, beautifully dressed, hurried out of the school building and called:

“Oh, Miss Campbell, may I speak with you a moment?”

“We might have known it,” cried Nancy Brown savagely. “If Billie Campbell hadn’t owned a motor car, Belle Rogers would never have given herself the trouble even to speak to her.”

You perhaps know what a dangerous quality snobbishness is in a girl’s school. A very little of it is like a drop of strong poison in a pail of water. It pollutes the whole pail. So it was at West Haven High School. Belle Rogers, the prettiest and richest girl in town, had picked out six more or less wealthy and intimate friends in the sophomore class and constituted herself leader of what they called “The Mystic Seven.” These seven girls held themselves aloof from the poorer girls in the class and committed the unpardonable sin of snubbing every girl outside their charmed circle.

Very bitter were the feelings of the other ten sophomores against the “Mystic Seven,” who refused to mingle in the sports of the class and kept themselves apart at recess, talking in low, mysterious voices and laughing behind their pocket handkerchiefs when the other girls strolled by.

“They always make me feel shabbier than I really am,” Mary Price had once said.

And now the “Mystic Seven” had snatched up this nice, athletic-looking, new sophomore, whom many of them remembered as a bright, romping little girl years before.

“I suppose they’ll have to call themselves ‘The Mystic Eight’ now,” said one of the girls, a little bitterly.

“Can’t we ask her to join the ‘Blue Birds’?” put in Elinor Butler, who was eligible in point of wealth to enter the richer society, but had coldly declined the honor and had formed a society herself, called the “Blue Birds.”

“She couldn’t belong to both clubs,” said Nancy, “and you may be sure she has accepted the invitation of that little golden-haired, blue-eyed Belle Rogers, who put on an extra soft pedal even to call out her name.”

“Well, Billie Campbell will probably never have cause to know that Belle’s tongue is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, so what’s the odds,” observed Mary Price philosophically. “We got on perfectly well before she came and I suppose we can manage to support life pretty comfortably even if she is a member of the ‘Mystic Seven.’”

Her friends laughed, as they strolled by twos and threes into the broad, arched entrance leading into the corridor of the building. Mary Price often relieved their wounded feelings by ending discussions concerning the “Mystic Seven” with a joke, although not one of them had been cut more deeply than she herself by the cruel speeches of Belle Rogers and her friends; for, since the death of Captain Price, Mary Price and her mother, as you will see later, had had a hard struggle to make both ends meet.

In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all her arts on the unsuspecting Wilhelmina Campbell.

“We have never met,” she was saying, “but I heard you were going to enter our class and I wanted to be the first to welcome you.”