Eleanor Brainerd - Concerning Belinda

"Wouldn't it? My dear, you may know cube roots, but you don't know schoolgirls. An absolutely fresh engagement is enough to make a flock of girls twitter for weeks. If there are smuggled love letters it's convulsing, and if there's parental disapproval and 'persecution' the thing assumes dramatic quality. Probably all the third-floor girls gather in Amelia's room after lights are out, and she tells them what he said, and what she said, and what papa would probably say, and they plan elopements and schemes for foiling stern teachers and parents. Amelia won't elope, though. She won't have time before her next engagement."

A bell rang sharply below stairs. Miss Barnes sprang to her feet.

"There's the evening study bell. I must go. I'm in charge to-night. But they do elope sometimes. This school business isn't all farce. Do watch Amelia, Belinda."

Belinda had finished the hat and was trying it on before the glass with evident and natural satisfaction.

"My respect for Amelia would soar if she should attempt an elopement, but even the sea-serpent couldn't elope with a jellyfish. Amelia's young man may be a charmer, but he couldn't budge Amelia beyond hysterics."

In the history of the school there had been an experiment with silent study in the individual rooms; but an impartial distribution of fudge over the bedroom carpets, gas fixtures and furniture, an epidemic of indigestion, and a falling off in class standing had effected a return to less confiding and more effectual methods of insuring quiet study.

As Miss Barnes entered the study-room, after her talk with Belinda, a group of agitated backs surrounding Amelia Bowers dispersed guiltily, and the girls took their seats with the italicized demureness of cats who have been at the cream. Amelia herself radiated modest self-esteem. She was IT; she was up to her eyebrows in romance! What better thing had life to offer her?

The teacher in charge looked at her sharply.

"Miss Bowers, if you will transfer your attention from the wall paper to your French verbs you will stand a better chance of giving a respectable recitation to-morrow."

Amelia's dreamy blue eyes wandered from the intricate design on the wall to the pages of her book, but they were still melting with sentiment, and her pink and white face still held its pensive, rapt expression.

" J'aime, tu aimes, il aime ," she read. " Il aime! " – she was off in another trance.

Miss Barnes would have builded better had she recommended algebraic equations instead of French verbs.

Following the study hour came an hour of recreation before the retiring bell rang. Usually the girls inclined to music and dancing in the parlours, but now the tide set heavily upstairs toward Amelia's room, which was at the back, and was the most coveted room in the house because the most discreetly removed from teachers' surveillance.

When Miss Barnes passed the door later she heard the twang of a guitar and Amelia's reedy voice raised in song. The teacher smiled. Harmless enough, certainly. Probably she had been over-earnest and suspicious.

Meanwhile, behind the closed door the girls of Amelia's set were showing a strange and abnormal interest in her music – an interest hardly justified by the quality of the performance. The lights in the room were turned down as low as possible. Amelia and her roommate, Laura May Lee, were crouched on the floor close by the open window, beyond which the lights of the houses around the square twinkled in the clear dark of the October night.

Huddled close to the two owners of the room on the floor were six other girls, all big-eyed, expectant, athrill with interest and excitement.

Amelia touched her guitar with a white, if somewhat pudgy, hand, and sang a few lines of a popular love song. Then suddenly she stopped and leaned forward, her elbows on the windowsill, her lips apart, her plump figure actually intense. The other girls edged closer to the window and listened with bated breath. A moment's hush – then, out of the night, came an echo of Amelia's guitar, and a tenor voice took up the song where she had left it.

A sigh of satisfaction went up from the group by the window, and Amelia laid one fat hand upon what she fondly believed to be the location of her heart. The stage business was appropriate, but the star's knowledge of anatomy was limited, and the gesture indicated acute indigestion.

The other girls, however, were properly impressed.

"It's him," murmured the fair one rapturously, as reckless of grammar as of anatomical precision. "Oh, girls, isn't it just too sweet; what a lot of feeling he puts into it!"

"The way he sings 'My Love, My Own,' is simply elegant," gasped Laura May. "I shouldn't wonder a bit if he's a foreigner. They're so much more romantic over there. An Italian's just as likely as not to fall in love this way and go perfectly crazy over it."

"Maybe he's a prince," Kittie Dayton suggested. "The folks on this block go round with princes and counts and earls and things all the time. Like as not he's visiting somebody, and – "

"If he were an Italian prince he wouldn't sing such good English," put in Serena Adams. Serena hailed from Massachusetts and hadn't the fervid exotic imagination characteristic of the daughters of the South.

"Well, earls are English."

"Earls don't sing."

"Why don't they?"

Serena tried in vain to imagine the English earl of her fiction reading warbling love songs out of a back window to an unknown charmer, but gave it up.

"I think he's a poet," Amelia whispered, "or maybe a musician – one of the high-strung, quivering kind, don't you know." They all knew.

"They're so sensitive – and responsive."

Amelia spoke as though a host of lute-souled artists had worshipped at her shrine and had broken into melody at her touch.

"Like as not he's only a nice American fellow. My cousin Sam at Yale sings like an angel. All he has to do is sing love songs to a girl and she's positively mushy."

Amelia looked reflectively at the last speaker.

"Well, I wouldn't mind so much," she said. "If he lives on this block his folks must be rich."

yearned the tenor voice.

"My, won't it be exciting when he does," gurgled Kittie.

"Does he do this every night?" Serena asked. This was her first entrance into the romantic circle.

"Five nights now," Laura May explained. "Amelia was just sitting in the window Wednesday night playing and singing, and somebody answered her. Then they played and sang back and forth. We were awfully afraid the servants in the kitchen would hear it and report, but they didn't. It's been going on every night since. We're most afraid to go outside the house for fear he'll walk right up and speak."

"He wouldn't know you."

Amelia turned from the window to look scornfully at the sordid-souled Serena.

"Not know me! Why, he'd feel that I was The One, the moment he saw me. It's like that when you love this way."

She pillowed her chin on her arms again and stared sentimentally into the back yard.

The song ended upon a high, quavering note just as the retiring bell clanged in the hall.

The visiting girls waited a few moments, then reluctantly scrambled to their feet and started for their rooms. But Amelia still knelt by the window.

"I'm positive he has raven black hair and an olive complexion," she said to Laura May as finally she drew the shade and began to get ready for bed.

The next morning the Youngest Teacher took the girls for their after-breakfast walk. Trailing up and down the streets at the tail of the "crocodile" was one of the features of the boarding-school work which she particularly disliked; but, as a rule, the proceeding was commonplace enough.