"Carried unanimously!" replied the girls.
"If you'll offer us tea again!" murmured Bess.
"Don't be greedy! No, to-day must content you. We can't have such an upset and spread to-morrow, or Miss Cartwright may put a veto on teas altogether. By the by, this isn't of course an Alliance meeting, but a few of us delegates are here. How is the 'Dramatic' getting on, Lottie?"
"Quite tolerably," replied Lottie; "but you know I'm ambitious. We're giving a united performance at Christmas with the High School and the Anglo-German in aid of the Children's Hospital. It's quite a good piece, a sort of Twelfth Night revels and mummers all combined. It's to be held at the Exchange Assembly Hall. I wish it had been in the Shakespeare Theatre, then we might have had an orchestra with it. I'm afraid the piano will sound so horribly thin and inadequate in that huge room. Somehow these things need a band to make them go. It isn't half festive without."
"Is the music written for the piano?" enquired Mildred.
"It would be fairly easy for strings, I dare say?"
"I have an idea, but I'll think it over, and tell it to you to-morrow."
Next day the monitresses reassembled in their sanctum at four o'clock to hold the short meeting which had been proposed. Laura had drawn up a list of very sensible and necessary rules, which it was their duty to see kept, and these were read, approved, and carried unanimously.
"It's all very fine for Laura to draft rules, but will she enforce them?" whispered Maudie Stearne to Bess Harrison. "I wish we could get her to be firmer with those juniors. She lets them take liberties continually."
"We'll try and keep her up to the mark," replied Bess, "and we must do all we can ourselves. It's well to have something to go upon, at any rate. I bless Laura for this list. I shall hold it over the heads of my set of youngsters, and make a special black roll of any sinners who transgress the least fraction of it."
"Woe betide IVB if they talk in the hall or make signals to each other across the studio again!" said Lottie aloud. "I think these regulations will about fix up the juniors, and if we stick to them we'll have no more trouble. Is this all the biz, or has anybody anything else to put to the meeting?"
