MUSTERING OF FORCES.
Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she received the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place. This was in consequence of a suggestion from Mr. Livingston Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.
"They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there," he said to that lady, "made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there the other day. Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a row with another girl,--gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a knife. Festive,--hey? Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as if she meant to stick her, anyhow. Splendid style. Why can't you go over to the shop and make 'em trot her out?"The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would, just as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had nothing in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon. Myrtle in the mean time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an extraordinary honor was awaiting her.
That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a leisure morning, did at last occur. An elegant carriage, with a coachman in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and wearing a hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal of Madam Delacoste's establishment. A card was sent in bearing the. open sesame of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place.
Miss Myrtle Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the fashionable woman and the young girl sat half an hour together in lively conversation.
Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as artistically composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind of various rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray that nodded on her bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her sandal. As for the lady, she was captivated with Myrtle. There is nothing that your fashionable woman, who has ground and polished her own spark of life into as many and as glittering social facets as it will bear, has a greater passion for than a large rough diamond, which knows nothing of the sea of light it imprisons, and which it will be her pride to have cut into a brilliant under her own eye, and to show the world for its admiration and her own reflected glory.
Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire inventory of Myrtle's natural endowments before the interview was over. She had no marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait Myrtle would be at one of her stylish parties.
She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.
"I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school," he wrote. "There is a young girl there I take an interest in. She is handsome and interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a thing has possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued.
Why can't you make her acquaintance and be civil to her? A country girl, but fine old stock, and will make a figure some time or other, I tell you. Myrtle Hazard,--that's her name. A mere schoolgirl.
Don't be malicious and badger me about her, but be polite to her.
Some of these country girls have got 'blue blood' in them, let me tell you, and show it plain enough."("In huckleberry season!") said Mrs. Ciymer Ketchum, in a parenthesis,--and went on reading.
"Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head turned by a village beauty. I've got a career before me, Mrs. K., and I know it. But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an eye on her. Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking her to come and stay with you a little while. Possibly I may come and see how she is getting on if you do,--won't that tempt you, Mrs.
C. K.?"
Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already made the young lady's acquaintance.
"Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole lot of girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.' That's his horrid way of talking. But your young milkmaid is really charming, and will come into form like a Derby three-year-old. There, now, I've caught that odious creature's horse-talk, myself. You're dead in love with this girl, Murray, you know you are.
"After all, I don't know but you're right. You would make a good country lawyer enough, I don't doubt. I used to think you had your ambitions, but never mind. If you choose to risk yourself on 'possibilities,' it is not my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no mistake about that.
"There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea.
