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Title: Betty Wales on the campus

Author: Edith K. Dunton

Illustrator: Eva M. Nagel

Release date: October 11, 2022 [eBook #69132]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Penn Publishing Company, 1911

Credits: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (The New York Public Library's Digital Collections)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BETTY WALES ON THE CAMPUS ***


[Illustration: THEY WERE ALL THERE]




  BETTY WALES
  ON THE CAMPUS

  _by_
  MARGARET WARDE

  _author of_

  BETTY WALES, FRESHMAN
  BETTY WALES, SOPHOMORE
  BETTY WALES, JUNIOR
  BETTY WALES, SENIOR
  BETTY WALES, B.A.
  BETTY WALES & CO.
  BETTY WALES DECIDES

  ILLUSTRATED BY
  EVA M. NAGEL

  THE PENN PUBLISHING
  COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA
  1920




  COPYRIGHT
  1910 BY
  THE PENN
  PUBLISHING
  COMPANY

Betty Wales on the Campus




Introduction


MOST of the girls in this story first became acquainted with each other
in their freshman year at Harding College, and the story of their four
jolly years together and their trip to Europe after graduation is told
in “Betty Wales, Freshman,” “Betty Wales, Sophomore,” “Betty Wales,
Junior,” “Betty Wales, Senior,” and “Betty Wales, B. A.”

It was during this memorable trip that Betty met Mr. Morton, the
irascible but generous railroad magnate. “Betty Wales & Co.” describes
how Betty and her “little friends” opened the successful “Tally-ho
Tea-Shop” in Harding, and what came of it. Babbie Hildreth’s engagement
to Mr. Thayer was one result, and another was that Mr. Morton gave to
Harding College the money for a dormitory for the poorer girls. Betty’s
“smallest sister” Dorothy was also in Harding attending Miss Dick’s
school, and it was for her that Eugenia Ford invented the delightful
Ploshkin. Somebody modeled one, and as little plaster ploshkins were
soon being sold everywhere, it turned out to be one of the Tally-ho’s
most popular and profitable features. Betty had thought she would leave
the shop to Emily Davis and return to her family, but this story tells
how she found herself again on the Harding Campus. And finally, how
Betty Wales, with the aid of one other important person, chose her
career and left Harding, will be found in “Betty Wales Decides.”

                                                  MARGARET WARDE.




Contents


      I. “TENDING UP” AGAIN                         9
     II. ARCHITECT’S PLANS--AND OTHERS             29
    III. THE CULT OF THE B. C. A.’S                47
     IV. THE GRASSHOPPER WAGER                     62
      V. REINFORCEMENTS                            78
     VI. FRISKY FENTON’S MARTYRDOM                 98
    VII. THE DOLL WAVE                            116
   VIII. MORE ARCHITECT’S PLANS, AND A MYSTERY    140
     IX. MOVING IN                                158
      X. GHOSTS AND INSPIRATIONS                  174
     XI. WHAT CHRISTMAS REALLY MEANS              191
    XII. RAFAEL PROPOSES                          213
   XIII. GENIUS ARRIVES                           229
    XIV. AS A BULL PUP ORDAINS                    249
     XV. A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SEEK--WITH
          “FEATURES”                              268
    XVI. THE MYSTERY DEEPENS                      285
   XVII. THE MYSTERY SOLVED                       299
  XVIII. FRISKY FENTON’S FOLLY                    318
    XIX. ARCHITECT’S FINAL PLANS--CONSIDERED      337




Illustrations


                                                 PAGE

  THEY WERE ALL THERE                  _Frontispiece_
  “I’M SORRY I WAS LATE”                           11
  SITTING DOWN TO REST ON A BAGGAGE TRUCK          84
  “YOU MUST TAKE OFF YOUR APRON”                  160
  JUST AS THEY HAD GIVEN HER UP                   241
  THE OTHERS STOOD AROUND LISTENING               282
  “WE’LL FIND ’EM, MISS,” HE ASSURED HER          327

Betty Wales On The Campus




CHAPTER I

“TENDING UP” AGAIN


BETTY WALES, with a red bandanna knotted tightly over all her yellow
curls--except one or two particularly rebellious ringlets that
positively refused to be hidden--pattered softly down the back stairs
of the Wales cottage at Lakeside. Softly, because mother was taking her
afternoon nap and must on no account be disturbed. Betty lifted a lid
of the kitchen range, peered anxiously in at the glowing coals, and
nodded approvingly at them for being so nice and red. Then she opened
the ice-box, just for the supreme satisfaction of gazing once more upon
the six big tomatoes that she had peeled and put away to cool right
after lunch--which is the only proper time to begin getting dinner for
a fastidious family like hers. Finally she slipped on over her bathing
suit the raincoat that hung on her arm, and carefully opened the front
door. On the piazza the Smallest Sister and a smaller friend were
cozily ensconced in the hammock, “talking secrets,” as they explained
eagerly to Betty.

“But you can come and talk too,” they assured her in a happy chorus,
for Betty was the idol of all the little girls in the Lakeside colony.

Betty smiled at them and pulled back the raincoat to show what was
underneath. “Thank you, dears, but I’m going for a dip while the sun is
hot. And Dorothy, don’t forget that you’ve said that you’d stay here
and see to everything till I get back. And if more girls come up, don’t
make a lot of noise and wake mother. Good-bye.” And she was off like
the wind down the path to the beach staircase.

Half a dozen welcoming shouts greeted her from the sand.

“We’ve waited ages for you,” cried one.

“Dare you to slide down on the rail,” called another.

[Illustration: “I’M SORRY I WAS LATE”]

“No, slide down the bank,” suggested a third.

Betty gave her head a funny little toss, threw the raincoat down to one
of them and slid, ran, jumped, and tumbled down the sheer bank, landing
in a heap on a mound of soft sand that flew up in a dusty cloud around
the party.

“I’m sorry,” she sputtered, wiping the dust out of her eyes. “Sorry
that I was late, I mean. The sand is Don’s fault, because he dared me.
You see, I had to mend all Will’s stockings, because he’s going off
to-morrow on a little business trip. And then I had to see to my fire,
and remind Dorothy that she is now in charge of mother and the house.
Beat you out to the raft, Mary.”

Mary Hooper shook off her share of the sand-cloud resignedly. “All
right,” she said. “Only of course I’ve been in once already, and I’m
rather tired.”

“Tired nothing,” scoffed one of the Benson girls. “You paddled around
the cove for five minutes an hour ago, poor thing! That’s all the
exercise you’ve had to-day. Betty’s the one who ought to be tired,
with all the cooking and scrubbing and mending she does. Only she’s a
regular young steam engine----”

Betty leaned forward and tumbled Sallie Benson over on her back in the
sand. “Hush!” she said. “I don’t work hard, and I’m not tired, and
besides, I shall probably lose the race. Come along, Mary.”

The race was a tie, but Betty declared that Tom Benson got in her way
on purpose, and Mary Hooper retorted that Sally splashed her like a
whole school of porpoises. So they finally agreed to try again going
back, and then they sat on the raft in the sunshine, throwing sticks
for Mary’s setter to swim after, and watching the Ames boys dive, until
Will appeared on the shore shouting and waving a letter wildly--an
incentive to Betty’s getting back in a hurry that caused Mary to
declare the return race off also, especially as she had lost it.

“Didn’t want to bother you,” explained Will amiably, “but Cousin Joe
drove me out in his car, and I thought that maybe the chief cook----”

Betty seized the letter and ran. “I knew things were going to happen,”
she murmured as she flopped up the beach stairway. “But there’s an
extra tomato that my prophetic soul told me to peel, and lots of
soup, and lots of ice-cream. Oh, dear, I’m getting this letter so
wet that I shan’t ever be able to read it.” She held it out at arm’s
length and looked at the address. It was typewritten, and there was a
printed “Return to Harding College” in the corner. “Nothing but an old
circular, I suppose,” she decided, and laid it carefully down in a spot
of yellow sunshine on the floor of her room to dry off.

Of course there was no time to open it until dinner was cooked and
eaten; and then Cousin Joe piled his big car full of laughing,
chattering young people and drove them off through the pine woods in
the moonlight.

Betty was in front with Cousin Joe. “Things look so much more enchanted
and fairylike if you’re in front,” she explained as she climbed in.

Cousin Joe chuckled. “You always have some good reason for wanting
to sit in front, young lady,” he said. “When you were a kid, you had
to be where you could cluck to the horses. But I certainly didn’t
suppose you went in for moonlight and fairies and that sort of thing.
I thought you were a hard-headed business woman, with all kinds of
remarkable money-making schemes up your sleeves.”

Betty patted the embroidery on her cuff and frowned disapprovingly at
him. “You shouldn’t make fun of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop, Cousin Joe. It
does make money--really and truly it does.”

“Well, I guess I know that,” Cousin Joe assured her solemnly, “and I
understand the extremely marketable nature of ploshkins. Will keeps me
very well posted about his wonderful sister’s wonderful enterprises
that are backed by the Morton millions.”

“Don’t be silly, please, Cousin Joe,” begged Betty. “I’ve just done
what any girl would have under the circumstances, and I’ve had such
very scrumptious luck--that’s all.”

Cousin Joe put on slow speed, and leaned forward to stare at Betty in
the moonlight. “You’ve pulled off a start that any man might envy you,
little girl, and you’re just as pretty and young and jolly as if you’d
never touched money except to spend it for clothes and candy. And you
still love fun and look out for fairies, and some day a nice young
man--I say, Betty, here’s a long straight stretch. Change seats and see
how fast you can tool her up to the Pine Grove Country Club for a cool
little supper all around.”

“Oh, could I truly try?”

Betty’s voice sounded like a happy child’s, and her eyes sparkled with
pleasure and excitement, as her small hands clutched the big wheel.

Cousin Joe leaned back and watched her. “I had a tough pull when I
started out in life,” he was thinking, “and no ‘such very scrumptious
luck,’ either, and I let it sour me. Betty’s game, luck or no luck.
Luck’s not the word for it, anyway. Of course people want to keep
friends with the girl who owns that smile. It means something, her
smile does. It’s not in the same class with Miss Mary Hooper’s society
smirk. I can’t see myself why that nice young man that I almost said
was going to fall in love with her some day doesn’t come along--several
of him in fact. But I’m glad I didn’t finish that sentence; I suppose
you could spoil even Betty Wales.”

Betty remembered her letter again when she stepped on it in the
dark and it crackled. She had undressed by moonlight, so as not to
wake little Dorothy, who shared her room at the cottage. Now she
lit a candle, and opening her letter read it in the dim flickering
light. Something dropped out--a long slip that proved, upon further
examination, to be a railroad ticket from Cleveland to Harding and
back again. And the typewritten letter--that might have been “only an
old circular”--was signed by no less a personage than the President
of Harding College himself. Seeing his name at the end, in the queer
scraggly hand that every Harding girl knew, quite took Betty’s breath
away, and as for the letter itself! When she had finished it Betty blew
out the candle and sank down in an awe-stricken little heap on the
floor by the window to think things over and straighten them out.

Prexy had written to her himself--the great Prexy! He wanted her to
come and advise with him and Mr. Morton and the architects about the
finishing touches for Morton Hall. Of all absurd, unaccountable ideas
that was the queerest.

“Mr. Morton originally suggested asking you,” he wrote, “but I heartily
second him. We both feel sure that the ingenuity of the young woman
who made the Tally-ho Tea-Shop out of a barn will devise some valuable
features for the new dormitory, thereby fitting it more completely to
the needs of its future occupants.”

Morton Hall was the result of a suggestion Betty had made to her friend
Mr. Morton, the millionaire. It was to give the poorer girls at Harding
an opportunity to live on the campus and share in the college life.

“Gracious!” sighed Betty. “He thinks I thought up all the tea-room
features. It’s Madeline that they want. But Madeline’s in Maine with
the Enderbys, and wouldn’t come. And then of course Mr. Morton may need
to be pacified about something. I can do that part all right. Anyway, I
shall have to go, so long as they have sent a ticket--right away too,
or Mr. Morton will be sure to need pacifying most awfully. I wonder
what in the world that postscript means.”

The postscript said, “I had intended to write you in regard to another
matter, connected not so much with the architecture of the new hall as
with its management; but talking it over together will be much more
satisfactory.”

Betty lay awake a long while wondering about that postscript. When she
finally went to sleep she dreamed that Prexy had hired her to cook
for Morton Hall, and that she scorched the ice-cream, put salt in the
jelly-roll, and water on the fire. She burned her fingers doing that
and screamed, and it was Will calling to remind her that he wanted
breakfast and his bag packed in time for the eight-sixteen.

At the breakfast table the cook--she ate with the family--gave notice.
She was going away that very afternoon.

“Most unbusinesslike,” Mr. Wales assured her solemnly, but with a
twinkle in his eyes.

“Most absurd,” Betty twinkled back at him. “I can’t suggest a thing to
those architects, of course, and they’ll just laugh at me, and Prexy
and Mr. Morton will be perfectly disgusted.”

“You’ve got to make good somehow,” Will assured her soberly. “It isn’t
every girl that gets her expenses paid for a long trip like that, just
to go and advise about things. You’re what they call a consulting
expert, Betty. I’ll look up your trains and telephone you from town.”

“And I’ll help you pack a bag,” announced the Smallest Sister. “You’re
just going in a bag, like Will, and coming back for Sunday, aren’t you,
Betty dear?”

“Yes, I’m just going in a bag,” Betty assured her laughingly,
“and coming right back to Lakeside for Sunday. But perhaps in
September--well, we need not think about September when it’s only the
middle of August; isn’t that so, little sister?”

The Smallest Sister stared solemnly at her. “We ought to make plans,
Betty. Now Celissa Hooper wants me to be her chum if I’m going to
school in Cleveland this winter, but if I’m going to be at Miss Dick’s
again why of course I can’t be chums with Celissa, ’cause I’m chums
with Shirley Ware. So I really ought to know before long who I’m to be
chums with.”

“You certainly ought,” agreed Betty earnestly. “But you’ll just have
to be very good friends with Celissa and with Shirley and with all the
other girls until I come back, and then mother and father and you and
I can have a grand pow-wow over you and me and the tea-shop and Miss
Dick’s and everything else under the sun. Now, who’s going to wipe
dishes for me this morning?”

“I am. What’s a grand pow-wow?”

“We’ll have one in the kitchen,” Betty explained diplomatically,
hurrying off with both hands full of dishes.

But the pow-wow was a rather spiritless affair.

“You’re thinking of something else, Betty Wales,” declared the Smallest
Sister accusingly, right in the midst of the story of the Reckless
Ritherum, who is second cousin to the Ploshkin and has a very nice tale
of its own. “If you’re going to look way off over my head and think of
something else, I guess I’d rather go up-stairs and make beds all by my
lonesome.”

“I’m sorry, dearie,” Betty apologized humbly, “but you see I feel just
like a reckless ritherum myself this morning--going out to play with
three terrible giants.”

“What giants are you going to play with?” demanded the Smallest Sister
incredulously.

“The fierce giant, the wise giant, and the head of all the giants,”
Betty told her. “The fierce giant eats reckless little ritherums for
his breakfast--that’s Mr. Morton. The wise giant laughs at them when
they try to show him how to make the house that Jack built--that’s the
New York architect. The head of all the giants--that’s Prexy--shakes
the paw of the poor little Ritherum kindly, and asks it not to be so
silly again as to try to play with giants, and it gets smaller and
smaller and smaller----”

“Just exactly like Alice in Wonderland,” put in the Smallest Sister
excitedly.

“Until it runs home,” Betty concluded, “to play with a little girl
named Dorothy Wales, and then all of a sudden it gets big and happy and
reckless again.”

“Then don’t be gone long,” advised Dorothy eagerly, “because I’m always
in a hurry to begin playing with you some more.”

“Thank you,” Betty bowed gravely. “In that case I won’t let the fierce
giant eat me, nor the wise giant blow me away with his big laugh, nor
the head giant stare at me until I vanish, recklessness and all, into
the Bay of the Ploshkin.”

“I’d fish you up, if you did fall into the bay,” Dorothy assured her,
with a sudden hug that ended fatally for a coffee-cup she was wiping.

“But it was nicked anyway, so never mind,” Betty comforted her, “and
you’ve fished me up lots of times already, so I know you would again.”

“Why, I never----” began the Smallest Sister in amazement.

“All right for you,” Betty threatened, putting away her pans with a
great clatter. “If you’ve stopped believing in fairies and if you’ve
forgotten how you ever went to the Bay of the Ploshkin and fished up
ritherums and did other interesting things, why should I waste my time
telling you stories?”

This terrible threat silenced the Smallest Sister, who therefore never
found out how or when she had “fished up” her sister. But on the way
east Betty, still feeling very like a ritherum, consoled herself
by remembering first her own simile, and then Will’s “Maybe I’m not
proud to know you!” blurted out as he had put her on board her train.
A little sister to hug one and a big brother to bestow foolishly
unqualified admiration are just the very nicest things that a reckless
ritherum can have. And who hasn’t felt like a reckless ritherum some
time or other?

Mr. Morton was pacing the station platform agitatedly when Betty’s
train pulled in.

“Twenty-three minutes late, Miss B. A.,” he panted, rushing up to her.
He had always called her that. It stood for Benevolent Adventurer, and
some other things. Grasping her bag and her arm, he pulled her down the
stairs to his big red touring car. “The way these railroads are run is
abominable--a disgrace to the country, in my opinion. Now when I say
I’ll get to a place at four P. M.--I mean it. And very likely I arrive
at six by train--most unbusinesslike. Well, it’s not exactly your fault
that idiots run our railroads, is it, Miss B. A.? I thought of that
without your telling me--give me a long credit mark for once. Well, I
certainly am glad to see you, and to find you looking so brown and
jolly. No bothers and worries these days, Miss B. A.?”

“Except the responsibility of having to think up enough good
suggestions for Morton Hall to pay you for asking me to come and for
taking the time to be here to meet me,” Betty told him laughingly.

Mr. Morton snorted his indignation. “That responsibility may worry you,
but it doesn’t me--not one particle. Now, by the way, don’t be upset by
any idiotic remarks of the young architect chap that has this job in
charge. Whatever a person wants, he says you can’t have it--that seems
to be his idea of doing business. Then after you’ve shown him that your
idea of doing business is to do it or know the reason why, he sits
down and figures the thing out in great shape. He’s a very smart young
fellow, but he hates to give in. I presume that’s why Parsons and Cope
put him on this job--they’ve done work for me before, and they know
that I have ideas of my own and won’t be argued out of them except by
a fellow who can convince me he really knows more about the job than
I do. Just the same, don’t you pay much attention to his obstruction
game. Remember that you’re here because I want this dormitory to be the
way you want it.”

Betty promised just as the car drew up in front of the Tally-ho.
“Thought you’d like a cup of your own tea,” explained Mr. Morton,
“and a sight of your new electric fixtures, and so forth. Miss Davis
is expecting you. Let’s see.” He consulted his watch, comparing it
carefully with Betty’s and with the clock in the automobile, which
aroused his intense irritation by being two minutes slow. “It’s now
three forty-one. I’ll be back in nineteen minutes. If I can find that
architect chap, I’ll bring him along. He knows all the main features
of the building better than I do, and he’s a pretty glib talker, so I
guess we’ll let him take you over the place the first time.”

Exactly nineteen minutes later, just as Betty and Emily Davis had
“begun to get ready to start to commence,” according to Emily’s
favorite formula, the inspection of the tea-shop and the exchange of
summer experiences, the big red car came snorting back and stopped
with a jerk to let out a tall young man, who ran across the lawn and in
at the Tally-ho’s hospitably opened door.

“Mr. Morton wishes to know if Miss Wales----” he began. Then he rushed
up to Betty. “By all that’s amazing, the great Miss Wales is the one I
used to know! How are you, Betty?”

“Why, Jim Watson, where did you come from?” demanded Betty in amazement.

Jim’s eyes twinkled. “From the Morton Mercedes most recently, and
until I get back to it with you I’m afraid we’d better defer further
explanations.”

Betty nodded. “Only you must just meet Emily Davis--Miss Davis, Mr.
Watson. She’s a friend of Eleanor’s too. And you must tell me one
thing. Is the architect out there with Mr. Morton?”

“No,” said Jim solemnly, “he isn’t, naturally, since he’s in here with
you. Architect Watson, with Parsons and Cope, at your service, Miss
Wales.”

“Are you the real one--the one in charge?” persisted Betty. “You aren’t
the one that won’t let Mr. Morton have his own way?”

“I am that very one,” Jim assured her briskly, “but there are some
lengths to which I don’t go. So please come along to the car in a
hurry, or I shall certainly be sent back to New York forthwith.”

“Gracious! That would be perfectly dreadful! Good-bye, Emily.” Betty
sped down the path at top speed, Jim after her.

“Did you stop to introduce yourself in detail, Watson?” inquired Mr.
Morton irritably, opening the door of the tonneau.

“He didn’t have to introduce himself,” Betty put in breathlessly, “but
I made him stop to explain himself, and now I certainly shan’t worry
about his objections and opinions, because I’ve known him for ages.
Why, he’s Eleanor Watson’s brother Jim. You’ve heard Babe and me talk
about Eleanor.”

“I should say that I have,” cried Mr. Morton jubilantly. “So you can
manage her brother as nicely as you manage me, can you, Miss B. A.?
I knew you ought to come up and see to things. Hurry along a little,
Jonas, can’t you? We’re not out riding for our health to-day. There are
some little things I haven’t just liked, and now that I’ve got Miss B.
A. to help me manage you---- Feeling scared, Watson?”

“Not a bit, sir, thank you,” said Jim with his sunniest smile. “But I’m
certainly feeling glad to see Miss Betty again.”

“What’s that? Glad to see Miss B. A.? Well, I should certainly hope
so,” snapped Jasper J. Morton. “I’d have a good deal less use for you,
sir, than I’ve had so far, if you weren’t.”




CHAPTER II

ARCHITECT’S PLANS--AND OTHERS


STOPPING at Prexy’s house to get him to join the grand tour brought
back Betty’s “ritherum” feeling very hard indeed. Jim was so dignified
and businesslike when he talked to Prexy and Mr. Morton; they were both
so dignified and intent on their plans for Morton Hall. And evidently
they all seriously expected Betty to do something about it. Betty set
her lips, twisted her handkerchief into a hard little knot, and walked
up to the door, resolved to do the something expected of her or die in
the attempt.

Jim, who was ahead, had the door open for the others when Mr. Morton
commanded a halt.

“Might as well be systematic,” he ordered, “and take things as they
come,--or as we come, rather. Now, Miss B. A., shall there or shan’t
there be a ploshkin put up over this front door?”

“A ploshkin over the front door?” Betty repeated helplessly.

“Exactly,” snapped Mr. Morton, who disliked repetition as much as he
disliked other kinds of delay. “What could be more appropriate than a
large ploshkin, cut in marble, of course, by a first-class sculptor?
Stands for you, stands for earning a living when you have to, therefore
stands for me and my methods, stands for our coöperation in putting
through a good thing, whether it’s a silly plaster flub-dub that
half-witted people will run to buy, or a building like this with a big
idea back of it. But Mr. President here seems to think I’m wrong in
some way, and young Watson says a ploshkin won’t harmonize with the
general style of the architecture. Now what do you say, Miss B. A.?”

Betty suppressed a wild desire to laugh, as she looked from one to
another of her three Giants’ faces. “Please don’t be disappointed, Mr.
Morton,” she began at last timidly, “but I’m afraid I think you’re
wrong too. A ploshkin--why, a ploshkin’s just nonsense! It would look
ridiculous to stick one up there.” She laughed in spite of herself at
the idea. “It’s 19--’s class animal, you know. The Belden might as
well have a purple cow, and the Westcott a yellow chick, and some other
house a raging lion to commemorate the other class animals. Oh, Mr.
Morton, you are just too comical about some things!”

Mr. Morton frowned fiercely, and then sighed resignedly. “Very well,
Miss B. A. It’s your ploshkin. If you say no, that settles it. Mr.
President, you and young Watson can decide between that Greek goddess
of wisdom you mentioned and any other outlandish notion you’ve thought
of since. It’s all one to me. Now let’s be systematic. The next
unsettled row that we have on hand is about the reception-room doors.”

This time, fortunately, Betty could agree with Mr. Morton, and the
others yielded gracefully, being much relieved at her first decision.
Then, quite unexpectedly, she had an idea of her own.

“Laundry bills cost a lot, and the Harding wash-women tear your thin
things dreadfully. It would be just splendid if there could be a place
in the basement where the Morton Hall girls could go to wash and iron,
and press their skirts, and smooth out their thin dresses.”

Everybody agreed to this; the Giants forgot their differences and grew
quite friendly discussing it. And up-stairs Betty thought of something
else.

“Typewriters and sewing-machines are dreadfully noisy. That’s one
reason why the cheap off-campus houses are so uncomfortable, where most
of the girls use one or the other or both. I remember Emily Davis used
to say that sometimes it seemed as if her head would burst with the
click and the clatter. If there could only be a room for typewriters
and a sewing-room, with sound-proof walls----”

“There can be,” interrupted Jasper J. Morton oracularly, “and there
shall be, if we have to put an annex to accommodate them. Miss B. A.,
you’ll ruin me if you keep on at this rate. I presume I’m expected to
install typewriters and sewing-machines. They’re part of the fixtures,
aren’t they, Watson? If I say so they are? Well, I do say so, provided
Miss B. A. accepts that proposal from---- See here, Mr. President, why
don’t you take her off in a quiet corner and tell her what you want of
her?”

Betty blushed violently at the idea of giving such summary advice to
the great Prexy.

“Please don’t hurry,” she begged. “You can tell me what you want to any
time, President Wallace. Mr. Morton is always in such a rush to get
things settled himself; he doesn’t realize that other people don’t feel
the same way.”

“Don’t I realize it?” snorted Mr. Morton indignantly. “Haven’t I spent
half my life hunting for people that can keep my pace? But I beg your
pardon, Mr. President, if I seemed to dictate or to meddle in your
personal affairs.”

Prexy’s eyes twinkled. “That’s all right, Mr. Morton. Let’s give him
his way this time, Miss Wales, as long as we’ve got ours about the
ploshkin. Come and sit on that broad and inviting window-seat, and hear
what we want you to do for us.”

It was an amazing proposal, though Prexy made it in the calmest and
most matter-of-fact way. The Student’s Aid Association, it seemed, had
reorganized at its commencement meeting, had received a substantial
endowment fund--so much Betty already knew--and had since decided
to employ a paid secretary to direct its work and to look after the
interests of the self-supporting students. It had occurred to President
Wallace that the right place for the secretary to live was in Morton
Hall, and to the directors that the right person to act as secretary
was Betty Wales.

“The salary is small,” explained Prexy, “but the duties at first will
be light, I should think. I assume that you will be in Harding in any
case, to supervise your tea-shop enterprise. Now this salary will pay
several extra helpers there, and give you time for an occupation that
may be more congenial and that will certainly be of real help to the
girls you have always wanted to help--to the whole college also, I
hope. Living in this hall instead of the regular house teacher, you
will have a chance to keep in touch with us as you could not off the
campus, and you will still be reasonably near to the famous Tally-ho
Tea-Shop.”

When he had finished, Betty continued to stare at him in bewildered
silence. “How does it strike you, Miss Wales?” he asked, with an
encouraging smile.

Betty “came to” with a frightened little gasp.

“Why, I--I--it strikes me as too big to take in all at once, and much,
much too splendid for me, President Wallace. I should just love to do
it, of course. But I can’t imagine myself doing it. Now Christy Mason
or Emily or Rachel Morrison--I could imagine them doing it beautifully,
but not me--I--me. Oh, dear!” Betty stopped in complete confusion.

“But the rest of us can easily imagine you as the first secretary of
the Student’s Aid,” Prexy told her kindly. “We considered several
others, but none of them quite fitted. We are all sure that you will
fit. The board of directors wished you to understand that the choice
was unanimous. As for me, I’ve always meant to get you on the Harding
faculty some way or other, because the Harding spirit is the most
important thing that any of us has to teach, and you know how to teach
it. This position will enable you to specialize on the Harding spirit
without bothering your head about logarithms or the principles of
exposition or cuneiform inscriptions or Spanish verbs. It seems like a
real opportunity, and I hope you can take it.”

“Oh, I hope so, too!” exclaimed Betty eagerly. “But the trouble
is, President Wallace, the world seems to be just crammed with
opportunities, and they conflict. One that conflicts with this is the
opportunity to stay at home with my family. I hadn’t decided, when I
got your letter, whether I ought to come back to the tea-shop, or be
with mother and father this winter. But living here and looking out for
the Morton Hall girls does sound just splendid. Please, what would be
the duties of the secretary, President Wallace?”

The President smiled. “Whatever you made them, I think. Perhaps the
Student’s Aid directors may want to offer a few suggestions, but in the
main I guarantee you a perfectly free hand.”

“Isn’t that even worse than to be told just what to do--harder, I
mean?” demanded Betty, so despairingly that Prexy threw back his head
and laughed.

“Think it over,” he advised. “Talk it over with Mr. Morton and your
family. Write to your friends about it. By the way, I suppose you know
that Miss Morrison and Miss Adams are to be members of our faculty next
year.”

Betty knew about Rachael’s appointment, but not about Helen’s.

“Oh, it would be great to be back,” she declared. “There’s no question
of what I want to do,--only of what I ought to do, and what I can do.
It would be terrible if I should start and then have to give up because
I didn’t know how to go on. It would be worse than being ‘flunked
out’--I mean than failing to pass your examinations,” added Betty
hastily.

“I understand the expression ‘flunked out,’” Prexy assured her gaily,
“but I never noticed any of your kind of girl in the ‘flunked out’
ranks. Well, think it all over. Mr. Morton will dance with impatience
when he finds that everything can’t be decided in a breath, and just
as he wants it, but we’ll let him dance a little; and if he uses too
persuasive powers on you in the meantime I should not be unwarrantably
interfering if I objected.”

“He can’t object to you dictating in his private affairs a little,”
quoted Betty gaily, as they went back to join the other Giants, who
were sitting on a pile of lumber, animatedly discussing the relative
merits of different makes of typewriters.

“Sewing-machines we leave entirely to you, Miss B. A.,” Mr. Morton told
her, with a keen glance that tried to guess at her reception of Prexy’s
offer. “Just let me know the kind you want and the number. No hurry.”

“That means that in about ten minutes he’ll ask you what you’ve
decided,” murmured Jim in her ear. “Haven’t you had enough of business
for to-day, Betty? Let’s cut out and take a walk in Paradise before
dinner. We can just about catch the sunset if we hurry.

“My eye, but it seems good to see you again,” Jim assured her warmly,
as they scrambled down the path to the river. “And it seems good
to see Paradise again, only it doesn’t look natural in its present
uninhabited state. There ought to be a pretty girl in a pretty dress
behind every big tree.”

Betty demanded the latest news of Eleanor, who was a very bad
correspondent, and then burst forth with her own plans and perplexities.

“I think you should accept the Harding offer by all means,” Jim assured
her soberly. “Only there’s one thing I ought to tell you. I’ve been
trying for a week to screw my courage up to the point of confiding it
to the peppery Mr. Morton. His beloved dormitory can’t possibly be
finished in time for the opening of college.”

Betty looked her dismay. “He’ll be perfectly furious, Jim.”

“Can’t help it,” returned Jim firmly. “He comes up nearly every week,
and at least once in ten minutes, while he’s here, he decides to
enlarge or rebuild something. See how he upset everything to-day for
your sewing-machines and typewriters and washing-machines. To-morrow
some book-worm will get hold of him and suggest a library, and he’ll
want us to design some patent bookcases and build a wing to put them
in.” Jim looked Betty straight in the eyes. “You simply can’t hurry a
good honest job. I’m likely to be hanging around here till Christmas.”

“As long as that?”

Jim nodded, still scrutinizing her face closely. “Of course I know
it won’t make any difference to you, but it would make all kinds of
difference to me, having you here. You can be dead sure of that, Betty.”

Betty smiled at him encouragingly. “You mean you want me to be here
to protect you from the pretty girls in pretty gowns who will begin
jumping out at you from behind the trees the day college opens?”

Jim shrugged his broad shoulders defiantly. “I’m not afraid of any
pretty girls. I suppose it will be a fierce game going around the
campus with no other man in sight, but I guess I can play it.”

“Oh, I see,” murmured Betty, who was in a teasing mood. “You want me to
introduce you to the very prettiest pretty girls.”

“Prexy can do that,” Jim told her calmly. “He’s my firm friend since I
stood by him so nobly in the war of the ploshkin. But I do hope you’ll
be here. We could have some bully walks and rides, Betty--you ride,
don’t you?”

Betty nodded. “But I shall be dreadfully busy--if I come.”

“I’ll help you work,” Jim offered gallantly. “I understand this
secretary proposition pretty well. I was secretary to the O. M.--Old
Man, that stands for, otherwise the august head of our firm--until they
put me on this little job. I could give you pointers, I’m sure, though
it’s not exactly the same sort of thing you’re up against. And I say,
Betty, Eleanor has half promised me to come on this fall while I’m
here. I’m sure she’ll do it if you’re here too.”

“That would be splendid,” Betty admitted, “only of course I couldn’t
decide to come just for a lark, Jim. I mustn’t let that part of it
influence me a bit.”

“Well, just the same”--Jim played his last and highest card,--“if you
want to be a real philanthropist, Miss Betty Wales, you’ll let me
influence you a little. If ever there was a good object for charity,
it’s a fellow who hasn’t seen any of his family for nine months and has
had to give up a paltry two weeks’ vacation that he’d been counting
the hours to, to hold down a job that may, in a dozen years or so,
lead to something good. It takes stick, I can tell you, Betty, this
making your way in the world, and sometimes it’s a pretty lonesome
proposition. But I don’t intend to be just dad’s good-for-nothing son
all my life, so I’m bound to keep at it. I hate a quitter just as much
as dad does. I can tell you, though, it helps to have a good friend
around to talk things over with.”

Betty’s brown eyes grew big and soft, and her voice vibrated with
sympathy. “Don’t I know that, Jim? Last year when Madeline and Babbie
were both away at once it seemed as if things always went wrong at
the Tally-ho, and I used to nearly die, worrying. And when they came
back and we talked everything over, there was usually nothing much the
matter.”

“Exactly,” agreed Jim. “So don’t forget me when you’re footing up the
philanthropic activities that you can amuse yourself with if you decide
on a Harding winter.”

Betty laughed. “I won’t,” she promised gaily, “although you don’t look
a bit like an object of charity, Jim.”

“Appearances are frequently deceitful,” Jim assured her.

“I should think so.” Betty jumped up in dismay. “I appear to have the
evening before me, but really I’ve promised to take dinner with Mr.
Morton.”

“Who-can’t-be-kept-waiting,” chanted Jim, giving her a hand up the
steep bank.

Betty stayed in Harding two days, during which she had many long talks
with Emily about the secretaryship and its possibilities. Being, as she
picturesquely put it, a Morton Hall girl born too soon, Emily could
speak from experience, and she suggested all sorts of things that Betty
would never have thought of.

“But that’s all I can do,” she told Betty, when that modest little
person declared that Emily, and not she, was surely the ideal
secretary. “I can explain what ought to be done, but I couldn’t do it.
It takes a person with bushels of tact to manage those girls. Maybe you
aren’t as good at planning as Rachel or I. That’s nothing. You’ve got
the bushels of tact. That’s the unique quality that the directors had
the sense to see was indispensable. You’re ‘elected’ to accept, Betty
dear, so you might just as well telegraph for your trunks.”

But Betty did nothing quite so summary. She wanted to talk things over
with the family, who would be sorely disappointed, she knew, if she
decided to come back to Harding, after she had hinted that perhaps
the Tally-ho could go on with only flitting visits from its Head
Manager. Besides, there was no use in losing the rest of August at
Lakeside, and the Smallest Sister would grieve bitterly if the ritherum
broke its promise to come home soon and play. Betty resolved to have
Dorothy back again in Miss Dick’s school. There were lonely times and
discouraged times ahead of her, she knew, and if a little sister is a
responsibility, she is much more of a comfort. Mother would have Will
and father, and if father went South again she would want to go too, so
it wouldn’t be selfish to ask for Dorothy, if----

But in her secret soul, Betty knew that the “if” was a very, very small
one. Father and mother would tell her to do what she felt was best,
and she had no doubt about her final decision. She almost owed it to
Mr. Morton to do anything she could toward making his splendid gift to
Harding as useful as possible, and if Prexy and the directors and Emily
were right she could do a great deal.

“And isn’t it splendid,” she reflected, “that when I’ve got less money
than ever I can do more? That proves that money isn’t everything--it
isn’t anything unless you are big enough to make it something. Oh,
dear! What if I shouldn’t ‘make good,’ as Will says? Why, I’ve just got
to!”

Betty set her lips again and walked down the platform of the Cleveland
station with her head so high that she almost ran into Will, who had
come to meet her.

“Get along all right?” he demanded briskly.

“All right so far,” Betty told him, “but there’s more ahead, and it’s
fifty times bigger than anything I’ve tried before.”

“Of course,” Will took it placidly. “No better jobs in this world
without extra work. If it wasn’t a lot bigger thing than you’ve
tackled before, it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.”

Betty sighed as she surveyed him admiringly. “I suppose you’re right.
I wish I were a man. They’re always so calm and cool. No, I don’t
wish that either. I’m glad I’m a girl and can get just as excited as
I like, and act what you call ‘all up in the air’ once in a while. I
don’t believe things are half so much fun when a person doesn’t get
dreadfully excited about them. So now, Will Wales!”




CHAPTER III

THE CULT OF THE B. C. A.’S


WHEN Betty first unfolded what Will flippantly called the Morton-Prexy
Proposition to the family circle, the “if” loomed very large indeed on
mother’s face and larger still on Dorothy’s.

It would be too much for Betty, mother said. “And I don’t want my
little girl to get tired and dragged-out and old before she has to.
There was some reason in her trying to earn money in her own way
last year, but now there isn’t the least sense in plunging into this
project, just when the tea-shop is so nicely started and she has won
the right to an easy time.”

“But, mother dear,” Betty interposed, “an easy time isn’t the chief
thing in life.”

“Not exactly a cause worth living for, is it, child?” laughed father.
“And being cook to the Wales family in the intervals when they happen
to have a kitchen never did seem to satisfy your lofty aspirations.”

“Yes, it does, father,” declared Betty soberly, “but you’re going to
board again this winter, so I can’t be cook much longer. It’s just a
question of where I’m needed most. That sounds dreadfully conceited,
but it really isn’t.”

So father laughed, and said that he and mother would “talk it
over,” whereat Will winked wickedly at Betty in a way that meant,
“Everything’s settled your way, then,” and hustled her off to dress for
a tennis match, in which the skill of the Wales family was to be pitted
against that of the Bensons. And just as the Wales family had won two
sets out of a hard-fought three, father was saying diplomatically to
mother on the piazza, “Well, dear, I think you’re right as usual;
we ought to let her go and try herself out. It’s not many parents
whose daughters are sought for to fill positions of such trust and
responsibility.”

“I hope she won’t have to learn to run a typewriter like a regular
secretary,” sighed mother, who had never in the world meant to let
herself be coaxed, by father’s adroit methods, into approving or even
permitting another of those “dreadful modern departures” that her
old-school training and conservative temper united to disapprove.

Father smiled at her indulgently. “If girls learned to write a
copper-plate hand nowadays as they did when you were young, we
shouldn’t be so dependent on typewriters. Betty’s scrawl is no worse
than the rest. Well, now that this matter is settled and off our minds,
let’s walk out to the big bluff before dark.”

So the discussion was closed, the “if” dwindled to nothingness once
more, and two weeks after Jim Watson had assisted Mr. Morton to
see Betty off in a fashion befitting that gentleman’s idea of her
importance, he was at the Harding station to meet her--quite without
assistance.

“Was I the last straw?” he inquired gaily, as they walked down the long
platform toward Main Street.

“The last straw?” repeated Betty absently. She was wondering whether
the Student’s Aid seniors would expect her to help meet the freshmen at
their trains.

“Well, the last figure in the column that you added up in order to
estimate the possibilities of Harding as a mission field,” amended Jim.
“Because if I helped to turn the scales in favor of your coming here I
can at last consider myself a useful member of society.”

“Now don’t be absurd, Jim,” Betty ordered sternly. “Whatever else
you do, I’m sure you’ll never succeed in being a brilliant object of
charity.”

“Unappreciated, as usual,” sighed Jim. “Nevertheless I invite you to
have an ice at Cuyler’s. It’s going to be very awkward, Betty--your
being proprietress of the Tally-ho. I can never ask you to feed there.”

“But you can ask all the pretty girls I’m going to introduce you to,”
Betty suggested, but Jim only shrugged his shoulders sceptically.

“Pretty girls are all right,” he said, “but I already know as many
girls here as I can manage--or I shall when they all arrive. Don’t
forget that I’m to help you meet Miss Helen Chase Adams to-night, and
Miss Morrison to-morrow, and Miss Ayres whenever she telegraphs.”

“You mustn’t neglect your work,” Betty warned him.

“Shan’t,” Jim assured her. “I’ve merely arranged it so I can meet
all Eleanor’s friends’ trains. There’s everything in arrangement. I
generally begin my arduous duties at nine, but to-morrow seven o’clock
shall see me up and at ’em--meaning the carpenters, bricklayers,
plasterers, sewing-machine agents, and all the rest of my menials.”

“With all the extra men that Mr. Morton had sent up, can’t you possibly
get through before Christmas?” demanded Betty eagerly.

“I can’t say yet,” Jim told her. “Is it so long to wait for your
sewing-machines and things?”

“Perfect ages!”

Jim frowned. Betty didn’t mean to be unkind, but any one else, he
reflected sadly, would have considered the personal side of the
matter. Betty was a jolly girl, but all she really cared for was this
confounded philanthropic job--and her tea-shop, maybe. She expected a
fellow to be the same--all wrapped up in his job.

Madeline arrived, according to custom, ten minutes before her telegram,
and swung up the Tally-ho steps to the lilting tune of her famous song,
“Back to the College Again.”

“Hello, Betty! Hello, Emily! Hello, Nora and Bridget! I say, but isn’t
this Improved Version of the Tally-ho almost too grand? No, I didn’t
write. I couldn’t; I didn’t decide in time. I had a special article on
fresh air children to write up for a friend of Dick’s, and a Woman’s
Page for the ‘Leader,’ because the person who does it usually, known
to Newspaper Row as Madam Bon Ton, has gone on a vacation to Atlantic
City. But I sat up all last night out at Bob’s, listening to her merry
tales and writing them down, and then pinching her awake to tell me
more whenever I ran out of material. And I did the Woman’s Page on the
train coming up here. We ought to have a real celebration for me after
I’ve worked so hard as all that just to come.”

“You go ahead and plan one and we’ll have it,” Betty promised
recklessly.

Madeline nodded, and rushed on to something else. “Is Rachel really
going to teach Zoo, and is Helen Chase Adams going to adorn the English
department? Christy wrote me about her appointment for History. Why,
Betty, there’ll be a regular Harding colony of the finest class this
year. You round them all up for tea to-morrow, and I’ll have the
celebration ready. Never fear about that!”

“You want Mary Brooks Hinsdale, of course,” Betty suggested.

Madeline nodded. “All the old bunch, but nobody who’s still in college.
It’s to be strictly a B. C. A. party, tell them.”

“Madeline,” demanded Emily sternly, “do you know what that stands for,
or are you going to think something up later?”

Madeline grinned placidly. “Dearest girl, as Madam Bon Ton calls all
her fair correspondents, never so far forget your breeding as to give
way to idle curiosity. It tends to create wrinkles. And speaking of
wrinkles, do you suppose Georgia will murder or otherwise dispose of
her new roommate and take me in for the night?”

They were all there the next afternoon. Little Helen Chase Adams was
just as prim and demure as ever, but the great honor that had come to
her had put a permanent sparkle in her eyes, and added a comical touch
of confidence to her manner. Rachel’s air of quiet dignity that the
head of her department approved of only made the funny stories she told
of her first experiences as a “faculty” all the funnier. Christy was
her old, serene, dependable self. Mary, in a very becoming new suit,
smiled her “beamish” smile at everybody, and argued violently with
Madeline about the relative importance of being a “small” faculty or a
“big” faculty’s wife.

“George Garrison Hinsdale is a genius, and he says he couldn’t live
without me,” declared Mary modestly but firmly. Then she smiled again
at the obvious humor of George Garrison Hinsdale’s remark. “Of course
he did live without me until he discovered me.”

“We couldn’t live without you either, Mary dear,” Rachel assured her.

“No indeed we couldn’t, you Perfect Patron,” added Madeline. “And that
reminds me that if you don’t hustle around and do something nice for
the Tally-ho right away, you’ll be expelled from the society.”

“There’s no rule about how often you have to do things,” declared Mary
indignantly, “and anyway I can’t be expelled when I’m the only member.
It’s too utterly absurd.”

“Is the Perfect Patrons a society?” demanded Christy eagerly. “Can’t we
join? It’s not limited to faculty’s wives, is it?”

“Rules for the Perfect Patron,” chanted Madeline impressively. “Rule
one: Only the prettiest and best-dressed faculty wife existing at
Harding is eligible. Rule two: In estimating Perfection patronizing the
firm is counted against patronizing the menu. That’s where little Mary
always meets her Waterloo.”

“I do not, and anyway those rules aren’t half so funny as the real ones
that you made up first,” interpolated Mary sweetly.

“Well, I’ve forgotten the real ones. Anyway, we don’t need Perfect
Patrons nowadays as much as we did when we were young and poor, instead
of prosperous and almost too elegant. So suppose we attend to the
organization of the B. C. A.’s.”

“Is that a society, too?” demanded Helen the practical.

“No, it’s a cult,” explained Madeline curtly.

“What’s a cult?”

“What does it stand for?”

“We’re all ‘Merry Hearts.’ What’s the use of any more clubs?”

Madeline met the avalanche of questions calmly.

“A cult is a highly exclusive club--nothing vulgar and common about a
cult, like the Perfect Patrons’ Society, with its crowded membership
list. As for the B. C. A. part, you can take a turn at guessing that.
If any one gets it right we shall know that it’s too easy and that we’d
better change to Greek letters or something. When you’ve guessed what
it’s the cult of, of course you’ll understand the object of organizing
it.”

“Very lucid indeed,” said Christy solemnly.

“Don’t try your patronizing faculty airs on me,” Madeline warned her.
“I may say in passing that in my humble opinion no faculty should be
caught belonging to a nice frivolous affair like the ‘Merry Hearts.’
A kindly desire not to exclude our faculty friends of 19-- from our
councils was of course my chief object in promoting the more dignified
cult of the B. C. A.’s.”

“B. C. A.--Betty Can’t Argue.” Mary, who had been lost in thought,
burst out with her solution. “She can’t, you know. She always smiles
and says, ‘I don’t know why I think so, but I do.’”

“Beans Cooked Admirably,” suggested Emily. “Then the obvious
entertainment would be Saturday suppers à la Boston.”

“Butter Costs Awfully,” amended Christy. “Then the obvious procedure
would be to open a savings account.”

“Better Come Again,” was Rachel’s contribution. “That sounds nice and
sociable and Madelineish.”

“Thanks for the compliment. You’re getting the least little speck of a
bit warm,” Madeline told her encouragingly.

“Brilliant Collegians’ Association,” interposed Betty eagerly. “That
must be right, because you’re all brilliant but me, and I’m the
exception that proves it. Have I guessed, Madeline?”

Madeline shook her head. “Certainly not. Brilliance should be seen,
not heard, Betty, my child. Besides, according to my well-known theory
of names, a good one should bring out subtle, unsuspected qualities.
That’s why editors get so excited, and even annoyed, about the titles
of my stories; they aren’t generally subtle enough themselves to get my
subtle points.”

“Well, I may say that I sympathize with the editors,” declared Mary
feelingly. “Hurry and give a guess, Helen Chase, and then maybe she’ll
tell us.”

“Bromides Can’t Attend,” said Helen timidly. “I suppose that’s wrong
too.”

“Wildly,” Madeline assured her.

“And also senseless, I should say,” added Mary. “What in the world are
Bromides?”

“People who ask foolish questions,” explained Christy, “like that one
you’ve just propounded. The others are Sulphites. Get the book from
Helen, who had it presented to her to read on the train, and then
you’ll know all about it. Now, Madeline, tell us quick.”

Madeline shrugged her shoulders and stirred her tea with a provoking
air of leisureliness. “It’s nothing to get excited about. Really,
after all your ingenious guesses, the humble reality sounds very tame
and obvious. We are the B. C. A.’s--the Back-to-the-College Again’s.
It sounds simple, but like all my titles it involves deep subtleties.
Why are we, of all the 19--’s who would give their best hats to be
here, ‘elected’ to honor Harding with our presence? What have we in
common? The answer is of course the sign of the cult and the mark of
eligibility. It’s rather late to-day, so probably we’d better postpone
the discussion until the next weekly tea-drinking.”

“Oh, do we have weekly tea-drinkings?” asked Christy. “Goodie! now tell
our fortunes, Madeline.”

“Yes, that’s a lot more fun than a silly old discussion,” said Betty,
holding out her cup.

“Wait a minute, Betty,” interrupted the methodical Rachel. “She hasn’t
told us the object of the cult yet.”

Madeline swept the circle with a despairing glance. “As if perfectly
good tea and talking about that ever-interesting subject, Ourselves,
wasn’t ‘object’ enough for anybody. But you can have an ‘object’ if you
like. I don’t mind, only you know I always did refuse to get excited
over objects and causes and all that sort of thing.” Madeline reached
for Betty’s cup, and promptly discovered a tall, fair-haired “suitor”
in the bottom of it. “He has an object,” she declared. “Can you guess
what it is? It’s Betty Wales.”

“Well, I’m sure Betty’s a worthy object for any suitor or any cult,”
Rachel declared. “If you don’t believe it, watch her blush.”

“I’m not blushing,” Betty defended herself vigorously. “I’m only
thinking--thinking how nice it would be if the B.C.A.’s would take me
for an object. I shall need lots of help and advice, and maybe other
things, and I shall make you give them to me anyway, so you’d better
elect me to be your object, and then you won’t mind so much.”

“I shall be much relieved, for my part,” declared Madeline. “An object
with yellow curls----”

“And a dimple,” put in Mary.

“Isn’t likely to be very much of a bore,” Madeline finished, and
turned her attention to tea-grounds again, discovering so many suitors,
European trips, and splendid presents, that Christy, who was house
teacher at the Westcott, disgraced herself by being late to dinner. As
for Mary Brooks Hinsdale, in the excitement of recounting it all to
her husband, she utterly forgot that she had promised to chaperon the
Westcott House dance and had to be sent for by an irate and anxious
committee, who, however, forgave her everything when she arrived in her
most becoming pink evening gown, declaring fervently that she should be
heart-broken if she couldn’t dance every single number.




CHAPTER IV

THE GRASSHOPPER WAGER


THE two weeks after college opened were the most confused, crowded,
delightful, and difficult ones that Betty Wales had ever lived through.
There seemed to be twice as many freshmen as there had ever been in
Harding before. The town swarmed with them and with their proud and
anxious fathers and mothers and sisters and aunts. They fell upon the
Tally-ho Tea-Shop with such ardor that Emily was in despair--or would
have been if Betty hadn’t assumed charge of the dinner hour herself and
adroitly impressed Madeline with the literary value of seeing life from
the cashier’s desk at lunch time.

Miss Dick’s school opened a fortnight after Harding, and then there was
Dorothy to meet--the Bensons had brought her east with them on their
way to New York--and the little girl was to be established this time in
the boarding department, to the arrangements of which she immediately
took a perverse dislike. Considering that she was the youngest boarder
and the pet and darling of the whole school, this seemed quite
unreasonable, particularly as all the year before she had teased to
be a “boarder.” But Eugenia Ford took most of this worry off Betty’s
hands, getting up early every morning to go over for a before-breakfast
story, told while she combed out the Smallest Sister’s tangled curls,
and never forgetting to appear in the evening at the exactly right
minute to deliver a good-night kiss.

“Don’t thank me, please,” she begged Betty imploringly. “Feeling as
if I had to do it makes her seem a little more like my very own. Just
think!” Eugenia’s eyes filled, but she went on bravely. “I might be
doing it for my very own little sister, if a dreadful French ‘bonne’
hadn’t been careless about a cold she took. How can mothers ever care
more about having dinner parties and dances and going to the opera,
Miss Wales, than about playing with their babies and seeing that
they’re all right? My mother is like Peter Pan, I think. She will never
grow up. And she never liked dolls when she was little, so naturally
she didn’t care to play with us.” Eugenia flushed, suddenly realizing
that she was indulging in rather strange confidences. “My mother is
a great beauty, Miss Wales, and awfully bright and entertaining. I’m
very, very proud of her. And if Dorothy is the least bit sick or tired
or unhappy on a day when you don’t see her, I’ll be sure to notice and
tell you, so you can feel perfectly safe.”

Of course the greatest problem, and one that nobody but Betty could
do much to cope with, was the launching of the secretaryship.
The secretary had been provided with a cozy little office, very
businesslike with its roller-topped desk, a big filing cabinet, and a
typewriter stand, tucked away in a corner of the Main Building; but
beyond that the trustful directors apparently expected her to shift
for herself. Betty promptly interviewed the two faculty members of
the board, who smiled at her eagerness and anxiety to please, and
advised her not to be in a hurry, but to begin with the obvious routine
work--that meant interviewing and investigating the needs and the
deserts of the girls who had applied for loans from the Student’s
Aid--and to branch out gradually later, as opportunity offered.

“But I can’t do just that,” Betty told the second B. C. A.
tea-drinking, “because it’s no more than they did themselves before
they had a secretary. It would be like stealing to take their money for
just that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” advised Madeline lazily. “If they want to make it a
snap course, isn’t that entirely their affair?”

“Why, Madeline Ayres,” objected Helen Adams solemnly, “it’s a
charitable enterprise. I don’t suppose snap courses are exactly wrong,
though they never amount to much, and so they waste the time of the
ones that take them. But it would be positively wrong for the Student’s
Aid to waste its money, when so many more poor girls want educations
than can have them.”

Madeline listened, frowning intently. “‘The Immorality of the Snap
Course’--I’ll do a little essay on that for the alumnæ department of
the ‘Argus.’ It will rattle the editor awfully, but she will almost
have to print it, after having teased and teased me for a few words
from my facile and distinguished pen. Thanks a lot, Helen, for the
idea. I’d give you the credit in a foot-note, only it might scare girls
away from your courses.”

“Aren’t you thankful, girls,” began Mary, waving her teacup
majestically around the circle, “that only one of us is a literary
light? I wonder if real authors are as everlastingly given to changing
the subject back to their own affairs as is our beloved Madeline. Now
let’s get down to business----”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Madeline. “Little Mary will now voice her own and
George Garrison Hinsdale’s sentiments on the immorality of the snap
course. Lend me a pencil, somebody, so I can take notes of her valued
ideas.”

“The business,” continued Mary, scornfully ignoring the interruption,
“is to find more work for Betty, so she can earn her munificent salary
properly. The meeting is now open for suggestions.”

“Well, Mary, fire away,” ordered Madeline briskly. “Of course a person
with your head for business is simply overflowing with brilliant
thoughts.”

“You think you’re being sarcastic, but just the same,” declared Mary
modestly, “I have got a head for business----”

“Witness the way you used to make your accounts balance when you
were in college, and the way your allowance lasted,” put in Rachel
laughingly.

Mary smiled reminiscently. “My dear Rachel, a head for business is
entirely different from being able to remember what you’ve spent. And
even if I remembered, I couldn’t add it all up. But that’s bookkeeping,
not business. As for using up my allowance ahead of time, I’m naturally
an expansionist, and where would any respectable business be, may I ask
you, if it didn’t go out every now and then and get more capital to
expand with? I expanded the possibilities of the Harding course, and my
father paid the bills; unfortunately there are always bills,” concluded
Mary with a sigh.

“Do you still finish your allowance on the fourth of the month?”
demanded Christy.

Mary shook her pretty head smilingly. “Never--for the good and
sufficient reason that George Garrison Hinsdale understands me too well
to give me an allowance.”

“The business of this meeting,” chanted Madeline sonorously, “is not,
as you might suppose, a discussion of little Mary’s domestic and
financial affairs.”

“Well, the girls asked me questions,” declared Mary indignantly, “and I
didn’t know that there was any such awful rush. I’m not trying to gain
time while I think up an inspiration, as you--well, I won’t start any
more quarrels. I’ll only say that I’m not delaying in hopes of having
an idea for Betty, because I’ve already got one. I think she ought to
advertise.”

“How?”

“Why?”

“Sounds as if she was a breakfast food or a patent medicine.”

“She’s an employment bureau at present,” explained Mary serenely,
“and when Morton Hall is ready to open she’ll be a house agent. She’s
got to let people know that the bulletin-board in the gym basement is
a back member, because she has it beaten cold. She impersonates the
great and only link between the talented poor and the idle rich in this
community.”

“That sounds well,” admitted Christy, “but how in the world is she to
do it--be the great and only link, I mean?”

Mary shrugged her shoulders, and began putting on her gloves, which
were new and fitted beautifully. “I leave all that to you,” she
said. “I really must go now. Miss Ferris is having an intellectual
dinner party for a philosopher from Boston, and we’re asked. I always
make a point of wearing my prettiest things to their intellectual
dinners--it’s the least and the most that I can do--and one’s prettiest
things do take ages to get into. Good-bye, my dears.”

“She’s hit it, as usual,” said Rachel admiringly, when Mary’s trim
little figure had rustled out of sight. “The important thing to do is
to make the girls realize what you’re here for. Most of them know that
you’re the new Student’s Aid secretary----”

“But they don’t know how to use you in their business,” Christy took
her up.

“And the ones that need you most will always be too scared,” put in
Helen Adams earnestly. “When I was a junior”--she blushed a little at
her tardy admission--“my mother lost some money, and we didn’t have
as much interest to live on. I thought I might have to leave college,
and I wondered if the Student’s Aid would help me to stay. But I was
too scared to ask. I started twice to go and see one of the faculty
directors, but I just couldn’t screw up my courage. And then mother
sold a farm that she’d wanted to get rid of for years, so it was all
right. But--well, I wasn’t ashamed to ask for help; I was just scared,”
ended Helen incoherently.

“Results of investigation up to date,” began Emily, who was dividing
her time between the cashier’s desk and the B. C. A.’s table. “First,
let people know what you are here for; secondly, take away the scared
feeling from girls, who, as well as you can guess, may need help;
third--this is original with me--get the girls who have money properly
excited about having things done for them. I can tell you, I used
to bless the B’s for the sentiment they created in favor of hiring
somebody to sew on skirt braids and mend stockings.”

“Well, the B’s aren’t the only ones who can create sentiments,” said
Madeline. “Georgia’s very good at it, and the Dutton twins are regular
geniuses. Fluffy Dutton could make people so wildly enthusiastic over
the binomial theorem that they’d be ready to die for it if she asked
them to.”

“Then get them started on Betty,” ordered Rachel. “Madeline Ayres is
hereby elected to enthuse all the champion enthusers on the subject of
the enjoyability of being mended up by somebody else.”

Madeline bowed gravely. “I hereby accept the chairmanship of the
committee on Proper Excitement of the Idle Rich, and I would suggest
Rachel Morrison as chairman of the committee on Proper Encouragement of
the Timid Poor, and Christy Mason to head one on Proper Exploitation
of Miss Betty Wales, the eager, earnest, and insufficiently employed
Student’s Aid Secretary.”

“If I might humbly suggest something at this point,” laughed Christy,
“it would be that Betty might like to invent her own committees and
choose the chairmen of them.”

“Oh, no indeed,” cried Betty heartily. “You all have such splendid
ideas and Madeline has such lovely names for things. Please go on and
think of something else. I haven’t dared to say a word all this time,
because I was so afraid that you would stop.”

“That’s the proper spirit for an Object.” Madeline patted Betty’s
shoulder encouragingly. “Accept the goods the B. C. A.’s provide.
Instead of not earning your salary, my child, you’re going to give
the Student’s Aid the biggest kind of a bargain. Besides one small
secretary (with curls and a dimple) they’re getting the invaluable
assistance of at least six prominent graduates, and any number of
influential college girls. If that’s not a run for their money, I
should like to know what they want.”

“Oh, they haven’t acted dissatisfied,” explained Betty hastily. “It was
only I that was worried.”

“Well, I should like to know what you want, then,” amended Madeline
with severity. Then she smiled a self-satisfied little smile. “It’s all
right to ask ‘What’s in a name?’ There’s nothing much in some names,
but if these committees of mine aren’t rather extra popular on account
of their stylish headings, I shall stop trying to make a reputation for
clever titles and devote my life to producing horrible commonplaces
for the Woman’s Page of the Sunday papers. I’m going up to the campus
this minute to talk to Georgia and Fluffy Dutton. Come along, Rachel,
and get your committee started too.”

“Wait a minute, Madeline,” Emily broke in. “Why not organize a sort
of council of all the committees, and have a meeting of it here some
afternoon next week to talk over the situation?”

Madeline stared at her sadly. “If you think I’m going to spoil my
perfectly good committee by asking it to meet, you don’t understand
the first principles of my sweet and simple nature. The last way to
properly excite people is to hold stupid meetings. Come along, Rachel,
before my beautiful enthusiasm vanishes.”

The next morning Fluffy Dutton appeared in “Psych. 6” ten minutes after
the hour, with a yard of black mohair braid trailing conspicuously from
her note-book.

The lecture was hopelessly dull, and the class concentrated its
wandering attention on the braid which, with a notice pinned to one
end, traveled slowly up and down the room.

  “For those wishing to be neat
  Here’s a plan that can’t be beat.
  Pin your name upon this braid
  You’ll a needy student aid.
  Tell her where and when to call
  And she’ll do it--that is all.
  She’ll rip the old braid, sew on new,
  And prompt return your skirt to you.”

So read the rhyming notice, and below it was printed in large letters,
“Lowest Prices for all Repairing, Mending, and Plain Sewing (including
Gym Suits).”

When the strip of braid got back to Fluffy it looked like the tail of a
kite, with its collection of orders scattered artistically up and down
its length.

“Yes, I wrote the rhyme,” Fluffy admitted modestly, when the class was
dismissed. “Wrote it between breakfast and chapel. What made me late to
Psych. was buying the braid. Georgia wrote one too, and we are racing
each other to see who gets the largest number of orders. Oh, yes, I
suppose they do need the work--or the money rather. But the thing that
appeals to me is the impression I shall make on my mother when I go
home all neat and tidy and mended up for once. Haven’t you a freshman
sister? Well, put her down for a gym suit, that’s a dear! Georgia’s
going to catch me a dozen grasshoppers if I win. I hate catching things
so--my hair always blows in my eyes.”

“And what if Georgia wins?”

“Oh, then I’ve got to catch her a dozen grasshoppers,” said Fluffy
resignedly. “But I don’t care much, because I shall hire it done,
and that will be all for the good of the cause. But I can’t believe
that she will win, because gym suits count as three skirt braids, and
positions for waitresses count as five. I’m going to get a lot of those
from eleven to twelve. Georgia is furious because this is her lab.
morning, and she can’t get a good start.” And Fluffy trailed her skirt
braid over to Junior Lit. where she got so many orders that she had
to unpin them, place them on file, so to speak, in the front of her
shirt-waist, and start over.

It may be reprehensible to wager grasshoppers; but, as Fluffy pointed
out to some humane friend, they were doomed in any case, and there
was a piquant flavor of adventure about the whole proceeding that
appealed strongly to one type of the Harding mind. The committee on
the Encouragement (and discovery) of the Timid Poor convened hastily
that same evening in Betty’s shiny new office, and discovered that
while their day’s work had necessarily been less spectacular than their
rivals’, it had been equally effective. There would be no trouble in
matching workers to skirt braids.

“But there’ll be all kinds of trouble about flunked courses,” announced
Eugenia Ford solemnly, “unless we remember to pay better attention in
‘Psych. 6.’ He gave out a written lesson for to-morrow on purpose,
because there was so much whispering and rustling around to-day.”

“The more flunking, the more tutoring,” suggested a pretty junior, and
blushed very pink when she remembered that Rachel Morrison was on the
faculty.

“That was a foolish remark,” she added apologetically. “For my part, I
honestly think there’ll be less flunking than usual. It makes you more
in earnest about your own college course when you see how some girls
value it, and what they’ll sacrifice to get it. Come along, Eugenia,
and let’s begin to burn the midnight oil.”




CHAPTER V

REINFORCEMENTS


THE initiation of Babbie Hildreth, which had to be over in time for the
participants to meet Eleanor Watson’s train, was the feature of the
next B. C. A. tea-drinking, held two days ahead of time in honor of the
double reinforcement to the ranks of 19--.

“I hope you’re all satisfied. I’ve come up here out of pure curiosity
about this old cult,” announced Babbie, when they were settled cozily
in Flying Hoof’s stall. “You all wrote the most maddening letters--it
was arranged, I know, what each one should say, so that I’d keep
getting crazier and crazier to be let into the secret.”

“Didn’t you rather want to see your elegant new tea-shop?” demanded
Rachel innocently.

“Ye-es”--Babbie flushed,--“of course I did. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Nora
must appreciate her splendid kitchen----”

“Why, you haven’t seen the kitchen yet, Babbie,” cried Helen Adams
reproachfully. “I’ve been with you every minute since you came.”

“Well, I can guess what it’s like, can’t I?” Babbie defended herself.

“Babbie Hildreth,” demanded Madeline, sternly, “when were you up here
last?”

“In August,” Babbie admitted sulkily, “if you must know. My Aunt
Belinda brought me up in her car.” She brightened in spite of herself.
“Aunt Belinda is so lovely and romantic. She thinks it’s all right for
me to come up and see Robert, since he can’t come very often to see me.
Mother doesn’t, exactly. But she was terribly amused at this B. C. A.
cult. She told me to run along and satisfy my ‘satiable curiosity’ if I
wanted to. I--oh, excuse me one minute, please!”

Having thoughtfully secured a seat at the end of the stall, Babbie
had been the first to observe a dark object in the act of vaulting
the Tally-ho’s back fence. She intercepted the dark object on the
front walk, and accompanied it forthwith to Paradise, where the tea
and marmalade that you hunger for and the curiosity that you feel
about mysterious “cults” may both, under favorable circumstances, be
forgotten as utterly as if they had never been.

So the B. C. A.’s amused themselves by inventing some stunning
“features” for a formal initiation ceremony to be held later for
Eleanor and Babbie together, ate Babbie’s share of the muffins and
jam, congratulated themselves on the way they had “set Betty up in
business,” as Mary Brooks modestly put it, and waited so long for their
beloved “Object” to appear--it was an office-hours afternoon, and Betty
had refused to desert her post even for a B. C. A. tea-drinking--that
they had to run all the way to the station, only to discover, on
arriving there breathless and disheveled, that the train was an hour
late.

“So we might just as well have preserved the dignity of the Harding
faculty and wives,” sighed Mary, straightening her new fall hat. “It’s
all your fault, Betty Wales. You said you’d come in time to go to the
train, and we kept thinking you’d arrive upon the scene every single
minute. And the longer we waited the more we ate, and then the harder
it was to run.”

“Some one came in to see me just at the last minute,” Betty explained.
“I couldn’t say that I had an engagement when it was just larks.”

Betty let the cult and its friends get all the orders they would for
skirt braids and gym suits, and all possible data about needy girls;
but she never confided in them, in return--a conservative attitude
which Madeline considered “distinctly snippy.”

“I just know you’re concealing all sorts of stunning short stories
about your person,” she declared. “Now Bob tells me lovely things about
her fresh-air kids. She isn’t such a clam.”

But Betty was equally impervious to being called a clam and to
fulfilling her obligations toward Madeline’s Literary Career. The humor
and the pathos that came into the secretary’s office she regarded as
state secrets, to be never so much as hinted at, even to her dearest
friends.

“But it sometimes seems as if I should just burst with it all,” she
told Jim Watson, who poked his head in her door nearly every day, and
rapidly withdrew it again if any one else was with her. “It isn’t only
the girls who come on regular business that are so queer, but the ones
that come just for advice. Eugenia Ford has the strangest ideas about
my being able to straighten things out, and she’s told her crowd, and
they’ve told their friends. Every day some girl walks in and says,
‘Are you the one who will answer questions?’ Then I say who I am, and
suggest that maybe she wants her class officer. But she says no, she
means me; and maybe she’s a freshman who has decided that she can’t
live another day without her collie dog, and maybe she’s a senior, who
has cut too much and is frightened silly about being sent home, and
maybe she’s a pretty, muddle-headed little sophomore who’s in love
with a Winsted man and doesn’t dare tell her father and mother, and
is thinking of eloping. Oh, Jim, these are just possible cases, you
understand, not real ones. But you mustn’t ever breathe a word of what
I’ve said.”

“I’m as silent as a tomb,” Jim would assure her gravely each time that
something too nearly “real” slipped out.

“Well, you’re the only one I ever do burst out to,” Betty assured
him, “except when I decide that it’s only right to ask Miss Ferris or
Prexy or some responsible person like them for advice. I don’t know
why I should talk so much more about it to you, except that you don’t
know any of the girls and never will, whereas Madeline would be sure
to write up anything funny that she heard, and Rachel and Christy and
Helen are on the faculty and the girls who come to see me might be in
their classes, and if Emily Davis knew she’d want terribly to tell the
rest.”

“All girls are leaky,” Jim would announce sententiously at this point
in the argument. “Besides, I’ve been a secretary myself. My job was
exactly the same as yours in the matter of holding confidential
information. Now when are you coming over to see about that linen
closet?”

It was really not at all surprising, considering how highly Jasper J.
Morton valued her opinion, that his architectural representative found
it necessary to consult Betty Wales almost every day on some problem
growing out of the peculiar adaptabilities and arrangements of Morton
Hall.

       *       *       *       *       *

The B. C. A.’s paced the station platform till they were tired, and
then they further outraged the dignity of the “faculty and wives”
by sitting down to rest on a baggage truck, and swinging their feet
off the edge. It was thus that Jim, who had taken the precaution to
telephone the ticket agent before leaving home, found them a few
minutes before Eleanor’s arrival.

“Do make yourselves as fascinating as you can,” he implored them all
naïvely, “so she’ll stay. She’s been taking singing lessons lately at
home, and her teacher had a New York teacher visiting her, and both of
them got excited about Eleanor’s voice. So now she’s written about some
crazy plan she has for a winter in New York, studying music. That’s all
right after Christmas, maybe, but at present I want her right here,
and the person who can make her see it that way wins my everlasting
gratitude.”

[Illustration: SITTING DOWN TO REST ON A BAGGAGE TRUCK]

“You’ll be likely to win your own everlasting gratitude, I should
say,” Madeline told him. “Eleanor was always expatiating on the charms
of her brother Jim.”

Jim blushed. “That’s all right, but I have a feeling that she’s keener
about some other fellow’s charms by this time. Plenty of fellows are
certainly keen about hers. But lately she doesn’t pay any attention
to them--just goes in for slumming and improving her mind, and now
her voice. So give her a good time, and get her excited about your
mysterious club, and when she begins on the earnestness of life and the
self-improvement business, ring in all Miss Betty’s philanthropies. And
I’ll come in strong on the lonely brother act. I say, there she is this
minute!”

Jim gave a running jump on to the platform of a passing car and had his
innings while the girls, taken unaware, scrambled down from their truck
and hurried after him.

It didn’t seem as if it would be hard to keep Eleanor. There was
the little awkward moment at first, that even the best of friends
experience when they haven’t seen each other for over a year; and then
such a babel of talk and laughter, of questions asked all at once
and never answered, of explanations interrupted by exclamations, and
rendered wholly incoherent by hugs and kisses.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” they told her.

“Yes, you have! You’re prettier than ever.”

“When will you sing for us?”

“Have you done any writing lately?”

“Are you too tired to see the Tally-ho right away?”

“You’re to live in Rachel’s little white house, you know, and we’re all
quarreling about when we can have you for dinner.”

“Picnics! I should think so. As many as you want.”

“Don’t those infants make the absurdest imitations of faculties?”

“How do you like little Mary’s new hat?”

They walked up Main Street chattering like magpies and forgetting to
turn out for anybody, Jim bringing up the rear with Eleanor’s suit case
in one hand and a book of Babbie’s and an untidy bundle of manuscript
that Madeline had dropped in her excitement tucked under the other arm.

Christy invited the whole party to dinner at the Tally-ho, and they
decided that it was quite warm enough to eat in the top story of the
Peter Pan annex. Jim had lighted all the Chinese lanterns and hauled
up two baskets full of dinner, while the girls chattered merrily on
as if they never meant to stop, when Babbie and Mr. Thayer appeared,
sauntering slowly down the hill from the direction of Paradise. They
didn’t seem at all ashamed of the way Babbie had been snatched away
from her own initiation party, but shouted up that they were simply
starved to death, and cheerfully assuming that there was dinner enough
and room enough for all comers, they annexed themselves to Christy’s
party.

“You’re lucky to have a sister to look after you,” Mr. Thayer told
Jim. “I opened a big club-house for my mill people last winter, just
to please these young ladies, and how do they pay me? By cold, cruel
neglect.”

“Nonsense!” Madeline contradicted him cheerfully. “We gave you a
splendid start. That’s all we do for anybody.”

“We’re all so busy,” Betty added quickly. “But we are just as
interested as we ever were. Isn’t the girl I sent you managing well?”

Mr. Thayer nodded. “Only she can’t seem to discover a genius who’s able
to take hold of the prize class.”

“Is that the one my adorable Rafael is in?” demanded Madeline. “Because
if it is, I might----”

“It is, but you can’t have it,” Babbie told her firmly. “They
changed teachers four times last year, after you dropped them so
unceremoniously. This time they’re to have some one who will stick,
aren’t they, Robert?”

Mr. Thayer looked uncomfortable, not wishing either to contradict
Babbie or to slight Madeline’s offer. “It’s better, of course, but
perhaps Miss Madeline will stick this time.”

“Robert!” Babbie’s tone was very hopeless. “Can’t you understand that
Madeline is about as likely to stick as Prexy is to dance a hornpipe
at to-morrow’s chapel?” She sighed deeply. “It must be terrible to be
a reformer; you have to be so hopeful about people’s turning over a
new leaf--whether it’s Madeline sticking, or a dreadful old Frenchman
beating his wife, or the angelic-looking Rafael learning his alphabet.”

“Haven’t they learned that yet?” asked Madeline incredulously.

“Certainly not,” retorted Babbie. “You jabbered Italian all the time
to them, and that spoiled them so that they never would study for the
other teachers.”

“I regret my reprehensible familiarity with their mother tongue,”
announced Madeline grandiloquently, “and I hereby make due reparation.”
Her glance wandered around the table. “I elect Eleanor Watson to take
the prize class.”

“Tell me about it,” Eleanor asked. “I don’t understand at all. I didn’t
know there were any foreigners in Harding.”

So they told her about Factory Hill, about Young-Man-Over-the-Fence
and his Twelfth-Night party that accidentally started the fund for
the club-house, about the education clause in the new factory laws,
the club organization, which was now so efficiently managed by the
Student’s Aid’s prize beneficiary--a senior who had earned every bit
of her college course--and finally about Rafael and Giuseppi and
Pietro and the other Italian boys, who scorned their French and Polish,
Portuguese and German comrades, and insisted upon their own little
club--a concession in return for which they played truant, refused
to study or pay attention, and quarreled violently on the slightest
provocation. They would have to be dropped from the factory pay-roll,
according to the new law, if they did not speedily mend their ways and
learn to read and write.

“Why, I should be almost afraid to be left alone with them,” Eleanor
exclaimed at the end of the recital. “Do they carry daggers?”

“No, they’re not quite so barbaric as that,” Mr. Thayer told her.
“They are just lively boys, who’ve been brought up with strong race
prejudices and no chance to have the jolly good times that would make
them forget their feuds and revolts. They work hard because their
fathers make them, and because it’s the regular way of living for them.
But being forced to study they consider the most bitter tyranny. The
factory inspectors have had their cases up twice now, and if I can’t
make a good report on them at Christmas I shall have to let them go.
I hate to, because they can’t get other work here, and if they leave
their homes and friends, nine out of the ten will probably go straight
to the bad.”

“There’s your chance, Eleanor,” Jim told her eagerly.

“But, Jim, I can’t ‘stick,’ as Babbie calls it. I’m here only for a
little visit. My music----”

“Go down every week for a lesson,” Jim ordered easily. “Don’t miss
a chance at a ripping New England autumn with all this good society
thrown in.”

“Even if you’re not staying long, do take them off my hands for a few
weeks,” begged Mr. Thayer. “They’re afraid of me and sulk stupidly if
I try to teach them, and they’ve been rather too much for any of the
girls who’ve tried.”

“Then what makes you think----” began Eleanor.

“You’ve been elected, Eleanor,” Madeline broke in impatiently. “That
settles it. You can manage them the way you managed that newsboys’
club in Denver. Oh, I’ve heard----” as Eleanor flushed and protested.
“That’s why I elected you. Now we want some songs. Where’s her guitar,
Monsieur Jacques? If Rafael won’t learn the alphabet any other way, you
can sing it to him.”

So Eleanor laughingly consented to meet the Terrible Ten, as Babbie
called them, the next night, and the Ten won her heart, as Jim had
hoped they would.

Eleanor never mentioned the alphabet. She merely inquired of the circle
of dark faces who had heard of Robin Hood, and receiving only sullen
negatives, she began a story. One by one the sullen faces grew eager.
At a most exciting point, where Robin and his band were on the point of
playing a fine joke on the Sheriff of Nottingham, she stopped abruptly.

“I’m tired,” she said. “That’s all for to-night.”

“You tella more next day?” demanded the graceless Rafael. He had fairly
drowned out the first part of the tale with muttered threats upon
Pietro, who had hidden his cap.

Eleanor hesitated diplomatically. “Would you really like to hear the
rest?” she asked finally.

Rafael’s brown eyes met hers, clouded with supreme indifference, and
his expressive shoulders shrugged coldly.

“Oh, maybe,” he admitted.

“Then what will you do for me? You can’t expect me to amuse you big
boys the whole evening, while you do nothing to amuse me in return.
This is a club, you know. In a club everybody does something for
everybody else.”

“What you like?” demanded Rafael, with suppressed eagerness.

“Yes, what you like?” echoed Pietro, the quarrel between them quite
forgotten.

“I’m very fond of pictures,” announced Eleanor gravely. “If you’d each
draw a picture of Robin Hood on the blackboard over there--here are a
lot of colored chalks--and put his name under it--Robin, we’ll call him
for short--why, I should think you’d done your full share.”

The Terrible Ten exchanged bewildered glances, and one after another
slouched nonchalantly to the chalk box. The colored crayons were
a novelty, nine of the Terrible Ten were born artists, and the
tenth--Rafael, whose crushed hand was still stiff and awkward--was
pathetically anxious to satisfy the new teacher’s strange demands. His
Robin Hood looked like a many colored smutch, with a sprawling green
frame around it--that was Sherwood forest, thrown in for good measure.

“Don’t forget the name,” Eleanor reminded them calmly, when, the
pictures finished, the artists began to exchange furtive glances again
in regard to the next requirement.

“You make lil’ sample on mine,” suggested Rafael craftily.

“No, I’ll make one up here,” Eleanor amended, “where everybody can see
it.”

And to her surprise the Terrible Ten, with many sighs and grimaces,
and much smutting out of mistakes with wetted fingers, toilsomely
accomplished the writing.

“Now,” Eleanor said, “let’s talk for a while before we go home. There’s
a bag of peanuts under my coat. Will you bring it, please, Pietro?” She
took the bag and grouped the boys around the long table. “Now let’s
play a game while we eat. I’ll ask questions, and the one that answers
quickest gets some peanuts. Listen now: if I give Pietro six peanuts
and Giovanni five, how many will that be?”

Dazed looks on the faces of the Ten, followed by anxious
finger-counting.

“Fifteen,” hazarded Pietro.

“Nix, nine,” shrieked Rafael.

Giuseppi got it right, and to make sure they counted at the top of
their lungs, while Eleanor passed him, one by one, the eleven peanuts.

“Now, if he gives Pietro two----” began Eleanor.

“Aw, come off. You say you gif to me,” interrupted Giuseppi. “I wish to
keep my peanuts.”

Eleanor gravely accepted the amendment. “All right.” She counted out
eleven peanuts, and held them up in her hand. “Now I have eleven
peanuts. If I give Pietro two”--she suited the action to the word--“how
many have I left?”

More frantic finger-counting, and this time Giovanni got the prize.

Then Rafael and his six unfed comrades burst into angry protests. “You
give Pietro two for nix. He never guess right.”

“No fair that he gets some for nix.”

Eleanor met the crisis calmly. “They’re my peanuts, so I can give him
two if I like. But wait a minute. See what I do now. I give Rafael two,
you two, you two, and you, and you, and you, and you. How many is that?
The one that guesses right gets as many as all you boys have together.
Quick now.”

Efforts to eat the peanuts and count them at the same time resulted in
absolute pandemonium.

“Let’s have paper,” Eleanor suggested. “That’s easier than doing it all
in your head.”

Before the evening was over the passing out of peanuts two by two had
accomplished the learning of the “two-times” table, as far as two times
ten.

“Who promises to come next time?” asked Eleanor, while they waited
awkwardly for her to gather up her wraps.

“Me.”

“Me.”

“Me.”

“You bet I do.”

“Dis club is O.K.”

“You doan fergit the story?”

“Not if you’ll all try to remember the ‘two-times’ table,” Eleanor
promised, shaking hands gravely all around.

“She’s de peach fer sure. Gotta all dem oder teachers beat,” announced
Pietro on the steps.

“Don’t you call her no peach. She’s a lovely lady,” corrected Rafael,
aiming a deft blow with his left hand.

“Ain’t a lada a peach?” challenged Pietro, dancing out of reach.

“All right for Italian girl, not good enough for lika her,” Rafael
answered fiercely.

“Wonder if she bring more dem peanuts next week,” speculated Nicolo.

“She ain’t no millionaire, maybe.” Rafael turned upon him scowling.
“But doan you dare fergit the two-times, ’cause den she’ll fergit
Robin. I killa de kid dat fergits.”

Rafael was evidently the Ten’s leader. They received his dire threat
in awed silence, and tramped off, chanting the two-times table with a
vigor that reached Eleanor, reporting her evening’s experiences to Mr.
Thayer, and clinched her wavering determination into a promise to stay
for at least a month in Harding.




CHAPTER VI

FRISKY FENTON’S MARTYRDOM


THE Smallest Sister was reconciled at last to being a boarder.

“I’ve got a new chum,” she announced eagerly, coming to see her sister
on an afternoon which Betty, feeling more than usually “caught-up” with
her other activities, had decided to devote to Dorothy.

“What’s happened to Shirley Ware?” asked Betty.

“We’re mad at each other--at least I’m mad at Shirley.” The Smallest
Sister assumed an air of injured innocence. “We don’t speak any more,
except to say good-morning at breakfast if Miss Dick is looking right
at us.”

“But that’s so silly, Dorothy,” Betty protested. “Shirley is a dear
little girl, and if you’ve quarreled it’s probably more your fault than
hers. Tell me all about it, dearie.”

“Well,” Dorothy began sulkily, “I’d just as soon tell you, only
Frisky--that’s Francisca Fenton, my new chum--she asked us all not to
say anything more about it. I’m not the only one that’s mad at Shirley.
Nearly every single girl at Miss Dick’s is too,--only being chums with
her makes it worse for me, because I’m so ashamed of her.”

“Who is this Francisca Fenton?” asked Betty, digressing diplomatically
for a moment from the main issue. “I never even heard you speak of her
before. Haven’t you become chums very fast?”

Dorothy nodded importantly. “She’s one of the older girls. Maybe you
haven’t heard me speak of her, but I’ve just nearly worshipped her ever
since she came last fall. The other day when I cried because I was so
mad at Shirley and so ashamed of her, why, she came and asked me to
be chums. Her chum was in it too, you see. I mean she took sides with
Shirley.”

“Sides about what?” asked Betty innocently.

“About being a tattle-tale, of course,” Dorothy began, and stopped
short, setting her pretty little mouth in a straight, determined line.
“Frisky asked me not to talk about it, and I shan’t,” she announced.
“So don’t you try to make me.”

Betty was mending a pair of Dorothy’s gloves. She stuck the needle into
the rip, folded the gloves, and silently began upon the holes in her
own stockings. Dorothy pretended to look out the window, but she kept
one eye on Betty, who appeared completely absorbed in her work.

“It’s a lovely day,” the Smallest Sister observed presently.

No answer.

“Aren’t we going for our walk pretty soon?” demanded the Smallest
Sister, after a polite interval.

There was another polite interval, then she came over to Betty’s chair
and repeated her question. “Didn’t you hear me, Betty? I asked can’t we
go for our walk pretty soon?”

Betty looked at her coldly. “You can go any time you like,” she said.

“But I’m your company. You asked me to spend the afternoon, and have
supper with you and Miss Eleanor and Eugenia.”

Betty continued her cold scrutiny of the Smallest Sister’s small
person. “I asked my nice little sister to supper,” she announced
judicially. “I didn’t ask a silly little girl who has silly little
quarrels with her best friends, and then won’t talk it over with me and
let me help her straighten it all out.”

“I don’t want to straighten it out,” muttered Dorothy defiantly, “and
Frisky specially asked us----”

“Not to talk about it in the school,” concluded Betty. “If she asked
you not to talk about it to your mothers and big sisters, why, she
isn’t a good kind of chum for you. She can’t be.”

Dorothy flushed an angry pink. “Just wait till you see her. She’s
lovely. She’s the nicest chum I ever, ever had.”

Betty got up quietly and handed the Smallest Sister her hat and coat.
“You’d better be going back, I think,” she said very cheerfully.

“Back where?”

“To school, of course, for supper.”

“I can’t do that,” Dorothy interposed hastily. “Why, I asked Miss Dick
for permission to come and stay with you till the evening study hour.
She’d think it was very queer for me not to stay.”

“I’ll telephone her and explain,” said Betty inexorably.

“I shan’t go if you do,” declared the little rebel. “So now! I shan’t
go!”

“Dorothy Wales,” began Betty gravely, putting one arm around the
Smallest Sister’s waist and drawing her stiff little figure closer,
“if mother were here and you acted this way you know as well as I do
what she’d do. She’d send you straight to bed to stay all this lovely
long afternoon. Now I’m not mother, so I can’t do that. It’s not my
place. But I can see that I’ve made a mistake in bringing you here. I
thought you loved me enough to do as I want--as I think best, I mean.
You don’t, so I must send you home to mother at once. Now I want you to
go right back to Miss Dick’s, and tell her that I can’t have you to tea
to-day. You needn’t say why. And I shall write to mother to-night.”

“But Betty----”

“There’s no use arguing about it, Dorothy,” Betty cut her short. “I
mean exactly what I say. Put on your hat at once.”

A month of being the youngest boarder and the school pet, supplemented
by Eugenia’s many flattering attentions, had badly spoiled the Smallest
Sister, but she could still recognize the voice of authority. In an
uncomfortable flash she came to her senses. Her sister Betty meant
what she said. She was going to be sent back to mother in disgrace.
For a few minutes longer pride sustained her. Silently she lifted her
chin for Betty to draw the elastic of her hat beneath it. Silently she
stretched out her arms for Betty to pull on her coat. With only a faint
tremor in her voice she said good-bye, and holding herself very erect
marched out of the room, shutting the door after herself in a fashion
that could not absolutely be called banging, because then Betty might
tell her to come back and do it over, but was perilously near that
unladylike mode of procedure.

When she had gone Betty sank down wearily in her big chair. She was
bewildered, frightened, discouraged. “I didn’t manage right,” she
reflected sadly. “I ought to have got around her some way. I can’t bear
to send her home. I love to have her here so, and then she will feel
that it’s a punishment--and it is too--when it’s only that I have to
do it, because I don’t know how to manage. I’ve tried to do more than
I can. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!” Betty’s golden head sank down on
the arm of the big chair, and her slender figure shook with her tears.

It was thus that the Smallest Sister, flying up the stairs and bursting
precipitately into the room she had left with such dignity, found her.

“Please go away. I’m t-tired. I’d rather be let alone,” Betty sobbed,
evidently mistaking the invader for somebody else.

The Smallest Sister hesitated, then her soft little arms tugged at the
prostrate figure. “Please don’t cry,” she begged. “Please listen to
me, Betty. I know I’ve got to go home. I haven’t come to tease you to
take it back--honestly I haven’t. But I’m going to tell you all about
Shirley and Francisca and me. I’d rather. Please don’t cry any more,
Betty dear.”

Betty sat up, dabbing at her wet cheeks with a damp handkerchief.
Dorothy offered her a dry one, and when Betty moved to one side of the
big chair and smoothed down her skirts invitingly, the Smallest Sister
climbed in beside her. Two in a chair is always the way to begin to
make up.

“Now I’ll tell you,” she began. “You see Frisky had a spread for her
four roommates in their study after the lights were out. She rooms ’way
down at the end of the long corridor, and they shut the door--that’s
against the rules--and lit a candle, and trusted to luck that nobody
would see it shining underneath the door. Miss Carson--the one we call
Kitty Carson, because she comes along so still--is their corridor
teacher, and she doesn’t often bother to go ’way down to that end,
unless there’s a noise. She didn’t that night, but Shirley woke up
and was thirsty and wanted a drink. And on the way to where the table
with the pitcher of ice-water is, she got lost, because the hall is
pretty dark, and she saw the light under the door and knocked, and they
started her back the right way. Next morning she was telling about it
at breakfast, and Kitty Carson heard her, and asked her all about how
she got back, and Shirley told every single thing--about the spread
and who was there and all. And so now Frisky has to stay in bounds for
two weeks, and she can’t have any candy or a box from home till after
Christmas. Kitty Carson wrote to say so--and that’s all, Betty dear.
Frisky said she was sick of the subject, and not to mention it again,
but of course she never meant not to tell you. I s’pose you have a good
reason to want to know. I’m sorry you had to cry.”

Betty leaned over and kissed the flushed, eager little face so close
beside hers. “Thank you for coming back,” she said. “Now we’re good
friends again, aren’t we?”

Dorothy nodded.

“And do you want to know what I think?”

Another nod.

“Well, I’m afraid you’ve all been very unkind to Shirley. Have you
called her tattle-tale, and shut her out of all the fun, and maybe made
her cry?”

This time the nod was very emphatic.

“We call her Tattle-tale Shirley. How did you ever guess that, Betty?
And we don’t associate with her at all. And she cries into her pillow
at night, because she hears us whispering secrets and we leave her out.
But, Betty, she ought to have to feel bad. It’s just mean to tell on
another girl. Poor Frisky has to walk up and down the tennis-courts
alone for her exercise hour, with Kitty Carson watching out of her
window to see that she does it. But she says she wouldn’t mind that.
What she minds is thinking anybody could be so hateful that she’d go
and tell.”

“But did Shirley mean to tell, or did she just get frightened and
confused and speak before she thought?”

“Well,” the Smallest Sister admitted reluctantly, “I s’pose maybe she
got rather frightened. Kitty Carson looks at you so hard through her
big specs that you generally do. But she had ought to have thought.”
Dorothy was earnest if not grammatical. “Frisky says she’d sooner be
expelled from school herself than get another girl into disgrace.”

“Frisky, as you call her, is older. Shirley is little and timid, and
I’m sure she didn’t realize that she was saying anything wrong. Did
she now, Dorothy? Tell me ‘honest and true,’ what you think. Did she
dislike Frisky, and want to get her into trouble?”

“No-o, I s’pose not. She used to say she worshipped her just as much as
I did.”

“Then do you think it’s quite fair to treat her as you have?”

“No-o, I guess maybe not. Frisky’s old chum, that she had before me,
said it wasn’t, but I didn’t s’pose she knew. I’ll tell Frisky what you
think, and I’ll tell Shirley that I forgive her if she truly didn’t
mean it. Of course I can’t be chums with her again, because now I’m
chums with Frisky. But I won’t call her tattle-tale any more, and I’ll
tell the others what you think.” The Smallest Sister sighed and slipped
off the chair. “I guess--I guess I’d better be going,” she said very
softly. “Were you--were you going to have ice-cream for supper, maybe?”

Betty stifled an impulse to take the appealing little figure in her
arms and promise her ice-cream and chicken patties and hot chocolate
and all the other dainties she loved best. She had been a very naughty
little girl, and mother would say----

The Smallest Sister, oddly enough, was also thinking of mother. “I
guess it doesn’t matter what you’re going to have,” she announced
hastily. “I guess mother would say I’d better go back and think it
all over by myself quietly, and--and next time ’member to ask you
first what you think about tattle-tales that don’t mean to be and--and
perhaps come some other night for supper. Oh”--her voice broke--“I
honestly forgot that I’m to go home.”

“But we’re friends again, now,” Betty told her, “and you’re going to
tell me things just as you always have. Aren’t you? Will you, I mean,
if I should think it over, and decide that it will be all right for you
to stay?”

“Yes, I will. I will ask you about every least little thing I want to
do,” declared Dorothy earnestly. “Do you think that maybe you’ll decide
I may stay?”

“Yes, I think I’ll decide that you may stay,” laughed Betty. “So don’t
ever make me sorry that I’ve decided that way.”

“I won’t. I’m sure I won’t. I just hate to have you cry, Betty.”

“I think,” Betty told her with a very sober face, “that you’d better
not come for supper for two whole weeks. That will make you remember
better perhaps. And when you come you may bring your new chum, if Miss
Dick is willing.”

“Oh, goody for joy!” The Smallest Sister quite overlooked the penalty
imposed on herself in the idea of being able to do something for her
dear, misused Frisky.

She said good-bye contentedly, because she could tell Frisky the sooner
by going home to tea, and she skip-hopped down-stairs and up the street
much too gaily for a naughty little girl who had been deprived of a
treat and sent away to think over her naughtiness in private.

Betty watched her smilingly. “I don’t seem to be able not to spoil
her,” she reflected. “But she’s just as sweet as she can be usually.
And she came back of herself to tell me, and she really sent herself
home, so I guess it’s all right--that is, if this new chum is a nice
girl. I do hope she is.”

The Smallest Sister did not ask to be invited to supper before the
appointed time, though two meals a week with Betty or Eugenia were
her usual allowance, and she had grumbled and even wept before, if
anything had happened to keep her away.

“Poor Francisca can’t even go to walk or down-town for two weeks.
I guess I can give up one thing I like as long as that,” she told
Eugenia, when that soft-hearted little person suggested intervening
with Betty for a restoration of privileges. “Francisca says it’s a
comfort to her to feel that somebody else has troubles.”

On the appointed evening Eugenia had a house-play rehearsal from five
to six, a class officers’ meeting at quarter to seven, and a written
lesson to cram for in Psych. 6. So Betty and the chums supped alone
at a cunning little table by the Tally-ho’s famous fireplace. It
was lighted with the “extra-special” candle-shades and there were
new menu-cards with fat, rosy-faced, red-coated coachmen cracking
long whips at the top, and an adorable sketch of the Peter Pan Annex
growing up the left side. Bob Enderby had designed them--under protest,
because he said he was much too famous to be doing menu-cards nowadays;
Madeline had colored them by hand, and the Tally-ho waitress had to
keep a sharp lookout to prevent their all being carried off for
souvenirs. One was lost that very evening; yes, for the first time in
the Tally-ho’s history, an extra-special candle-shade was missing at
the close of the dinner-hour.

Francisca and Dorothy arrived late and breathless--they had been kept
to tidy their rooms, Dorothy explained, but Francisca shook her head
playfully at her small friend and took all the blame.

“I’m always being kept for something,” she said cheerfully. “It’s a
perfect miracle that I’m here at all. If I don’t have to copy my French
exercise one hundred times because I didn’t pay attention in class, I
have to learn ‘Paradise Lost’ because I contradicted Kit--Miss Carson,
or else I don’t pick up my nightie and--well, I’m just always in hot
water, Miss Wales. It was lovely of you to ask me. Please call me
Frisky--everybody does.”

Francisca was the prettiest girl--next to Eleanor Watson--that Betty
had ever seen. Her eyes were soft and deep and very, very brown--like
big chocolate creams. Her hair was dark and wavy, growing low down on
her forehead in a widow’s peak. She puffed it out around her face in a
fashion that was too old for her, but was nevertheless very becoming.
Her manner was that of an older girl too--very assured and confident,
but very charming. When she smiled, which she did most of the time,
two big dimples showed. She lisped a little, and this gave a funny,
childlike twist to her remarks, which were not at all childlike. She
adopted a curious attitude of resignation toward the cruel fate that
kept her always “in hot water.” She was sweetly forgiving toward those
who had inflicted the two weeks’ penance just ended, and she thanked
Betty for her opinion, sent by Dorothy, about little Shirley Ware. She
had entirely forgiven Shirley, she said, and she meant to forget about
it and hoped Shirley would do the same.

“You see,” she explained, “all the little girls love me so that I
imagine they did make her pretty uncomfortable. I never meant them
to, Miss Wales, but you can’t help being a favorite and having people
champion your cause. Can you now?”

She made picturesquely vague references to some secret sorrow that was
even worse than being in perpetual hot water at Miss Dick’s. Afterward
Betty inquired about it from Dorothy.

“Oh, she’s got a stepmother,” Dorothy explained in awe-struck
tones. “They don’t get along well together. Frisky says she’s very
unsympathetic.” Dorothy pulled out the long word with much difficulty.

But for all her vanity and absurdity Frisky Fenton was a lovable
creature. She was preëminently a “jolly girl.” She had comical names
for all Miss Dick’s teachers. She hit off the peculiarities of her
schoolmates, and told absurd stories about them. She noticed everything
that went on around her and kept up a vivacious fire of comment. As
soon as she forgot to affect resignation and the secret sorrow, she
was most appreciative of all the pleasures life had to offer and
particularly of the treat Betty had given her. Everything they had to
eat was “simply great,” the Tally-ho was “exactly perfect,” Betty was
“too sweet,” and Dorothy “a little darling.”

Betty decided that she was only silly on top, and, though she much
preferred Shirley as a best friend for Dorothy, she saw no reason to
worry about Francisca’s bad influence, especially as the Smallest
Sister displayed much conscientiousness in the matter of coming to
consult her big sister on all important matters.

She came twice that very week. Once it was to ask if she should wear
her best white dress, or only her second best blue one to Shirley’s
birthday party. Frisky had advised the best, under all the delicate
circumstances, but Dorothy wanted to be quite sure. The next time
a moral question was involved. If you were asked to a spread after
bedtime was it wrong to go? Betty, who detested prigs, dexterously
evaded the issue.

“It’s rather messy eating in the dark, and you must get awfully sleepy
waiting for the teachers to go to bed. When you’ve all got desperately
hungry for good eats let me know, and we’ll have a scrumptious spread
at the Tally-ho.”




CHAPTER VII

THE DOLL WAVE


THE B. C. A. initiation was naturally a joyous occasion. To begin
with, Babbie Hildreth was commanded to stand for half an hour outside
the tea-shop with a huge “engaged” sign pinned across her shoulders.
She smiled composedly, waited patiently for the sign to be adjusted,
and then, since no particular position had been specified, mounted
hastily to the top story of the Peter Pan Annex, where the yellowing
leaves completely hid her from curious eyes. Eleanor was meanwhile
led to the kitchen and told to make sugar-cookies after the family
recipe. As she had never in her life made sugar-cookies--or any other
kind--her demonstration proved entertaining enough to while away the
half hour very pleasantly. Then Babbie was called down, given one of
Eleanor’s cookies, and told to keep on eating it until she could guess
what it was meant to be. She ate it all, making many vain protests,
and was only excused from sampling another because she threatened, in
an irresistibly clever speech, to appeal to the Humane Society. Mary
Brooks was next instructed to write to the person whom she thought
it most concerned, warning him about Eleanor’s lack of domestic
accomplishments. Then Madeline read some “Rules for the Engaged
Member,” which were almost as funny as the “Rules for the Perfect
Patron.”

Babbie had just been put in the most retired corner of the B. C. A.’s
stall and told to do her “Mary-had-a-Little-Lamb” stunt, when Georgia
and the Dutton twins arrived upon the scene, hot from a tennis match
and voicing a reckless determination to go straight through all the
sundaes and cooling drinks on the new menu.

“We can sit with you, can’t we?” asked Straight Dutton. “The other
stalls all have people in them, and Fluffy’s hair is a disgrace to be
seen.”

“Then take her out behind the house--or shop or barn, whatever you call
it--and pin it up,” Madeline told them severely. “Certainly you can’t
come in here. This is a B. C. A. tea-drinking and initiation. You’re
not B. C. A.’s.”

“That’s not our fault. It’s perfectly mean of you to have a secret
society and leave us out,” wailed Fluffy. “Think of all the orders we
got you for skirt braids.”

“In this hard world, my children, virtue is often its only reward,”
Mary reminded them sweetly. “Run away now and play.”

“Let’s spite them by stalking out of their old tea-shop and
transferring our valuable patronage to Cuyler’s,” suggested Georgia.

“I’m too tired to stir,” protested Fluffy. “Let’s stay here and play a
lovely party of our own right under their noses, and never ask them to
come.”

“Let’s sit down quick.”

“Shall we begin with sundaes or lemonade?”

“With both,” announced Fluffy with decision, smiling so persuasively at
Nora that she abandoned two fussy heads of departments, who wanted more
hot water, milk for their tea instead of lemon, and steamed muffins
instead of toasted, while she supplied Fluffy, first with hairpins from
the box that Betty kept in her desk on purpose for such emergencies,
and then with three sundaes and two cold drinks.

Fluffy arranged the five glasses in an artistic crescent in front of
her, and sipped and tasted happily.

“You’re not true sports,” she told the others, who had been content to
begin with one order each. “You won’t be hungry after the second thing
you order--or maybe the third for Georgia-of-the-huge-appetite--and
then you’ll stop, whereas I----” She waved her hand around the inviting
crescent. “The fateful check is made out, and I can eat ’em or leave
’em--it’s all the same to my pocketbook and the Tally-ho. I wish Betty
Wales would come out and say if I’m not the Perfect Patron this trip.”

“Well, she won’t,” declared Straight practically, “and if she should
you’d better remember that it’s your duty to act very haughty and
independent. Come on now and think up something nice for us to do.”

“Wish we knew what B. C. A. meant,” Georgia reflected. “Then we could
parody it.”

“Well, we don’t,” Straight reminded her sharply, “so it’s no use
wishing. We’ve worn ourselves out before this trying to guess. The
thing to do is to think of some regular picnic of a stunt that they’ll
just wish they’d thought of first. Then they’ll respect us more,
and realize what a mistake they made in having a snippy little 19--
society, when they might have had us in it too.”

“S-h!” ordered Fluffy impatiently. “Nobody can think of anything while
you chatter along like that. Let’s keep perfectly still for five
minutes--just eat and think. I’m sure we shall get at it that way.
Georgia, you’ve got a watch that goes. Tell us when time’s up.”

Georgia was too much occupied with keeping track of the time limit to
hit upon an idea, and when Straight’s sundae gave out at the end of
the second minute, she could not keep her eyes and her mind from a
furtive consideration of the menu. So nobody interrupted Fluffy when,
at Georgia’s “Time’s up,” she shot out a triumphant, “I’ve got it!”

“I’m not sure whether it’s four minutes or five,” said Georgia
anxiously, “but if you’ve got it, Fluffy, fire away.”

“Well, only the general plan,” explained Fluffy modestly. “I think we
ought to set a silly fashion. We can--girls are like sheep, and we’ve
made a reputation for doing interesting things that all the others wish
they could do too. We can call the thing the ‘C. I.’s’--that’s for
Complete Idiots--and not tell a soul what it means until we’re ready to
back out and let our devoted followers feel as silly as they have to.
It will be a circus pretending to be keen for it ourselves and egging
the others on, and it will just show the B. C. A.’s that we’re not as
young and simple-minded as maybe they think us.”

“That sounds good to me,” agreed Georgia, “only what fashion shall we
set?”

Fluffy frowned and rumpled her hair absently. “I can’t think of
anything silly enough. Big bows and pompadours and coronet braids and
so on are as silly now as they possibly could be. Shoes without heels
wouldn’t be extreme enough. Prexy wouldn’t let us wear a uniform, even
if we could think of a ridiculous enough one. I guess it can’t be
anything about dress.”

“Some fad for our desks, like ploshkins,” suggested Straight.

“Only not a bit copy-catted from that, because some of the B. C. A.’s
helped start ploshkins,” amended Georgia.

“Let’s take another think,” said Fluffy.

“Wait a minute,” begged Straight, and providently ordered two more
sundaes to span the terrible interval.

“You keep time on this thought,” ordered Georgia, passing her watch to
Fluffy.

Fluffy nodded abstractedly.

“Five minutes,” she announced presently. “I can’t think of----”

“This time I’ve got it,” Georgia broke in eagerly. “First I thought of
a silly game like tops or marbles or skipping ropes, and then I thought
of dolls--buying them and dressing them and carrying them around. I
heard of a girls’ school that did it once in dead earnest.” She looked
anxiously at Fluffy, who could “get people excited over the fourth
dimension if she wanted to.” “What about it, Fluff?”

Fluffy sipped from each of her five glasses reflectively before she
answered.

“Dolls it is,” she said briefly at last. “Come on down and buy ours
now.”

The straight-haired twin had never played with dolls in her life,
having scorned all feminine diversions and spent her youth chasing
rabbits, riding her pony, or playing tag, hockey, and prisoner’s base
with her brothers and her brothers’ friends. She chose the biggest,
most elegant, and expensive French doll in the shop, named her Rosa
Marie on the spot, and paid for Georgia’s choice--a huge wooden doll
with staring blue eyes and matted black hair--on condition that Georgia
would help her dress Rosa Marie.

“You’re actually getting fond of Rosa Marie already,” Georgia teased
her.

“Maybe I am,” said Straight stoutly, “but you’d better not fuss, when
I’m spending such a lot to help along your game.”

“Lucky we’re starting on it so early in the month,” Fluffy said, a
baby doll in a lace bonnet and a long white dress in one hand, and an
Esquimaux, in white fur from head to foot, in the other.

“Get ’em both and come along,” advised Georgia. “You’ll look terribly
cute going home with one on each arm.”

“And if you get small ones you can be getting more all the time,”
Straight took her up. “Have a regular family, you know, and a carriage
to take them out in, and a doll’s house to keep them in at home. A
doll’s house would look great in your room, Fluffy dear.”

“It’s so bare and cheerless that it just needs a doll’s house,”
declared Georgia. “I dare you to buy one and put it on your royal
Bokara rug, between your teakwood table and your Dutch tee-stopf, with
your best Whistler print hanging over it.”

Fluffy turned to the saleswoman. “These two, please,” she said, “and
let me see your largest, loveliest doll’s house.”

The organizers and charter members of the C. I.’s tramped home in the
autumn twilight, quarreling amiably about the relative advantages of
“risking” to-morrow’s Logic quiz and writing “Lit.” papers between
breakfast and chapel, or making a night of it--and in that case should
the doll-dressing come before or after ten?

“I can’t ‘risk’ Logic,” Straight confessed sadly. “I’ve been warned
already. Don’t make me sit up all by myself to cram. I’d almost rather
not dress Rosa Marie to-night than do that.”

Just then they ran into Eugenia Ford coming out of the Music Building.

“Hello, Miss Ford,” Georgia greeted her pleasantly. “Look at Fluffy’s
dolls. Have you got one yet?”

Eugenia, somewhat dazed by the suddenness of the onslaught, went into
raptures over the baby doll, blushingly acknowledged that she hadn’t
one, and begged for more light on the matter.

“Oh, well, you’re not so far behind the times,” Fluffy consoled her
sweetly. “The limit is day after to-morrow, isn’t it, Georgia? If you
get one all ready by then, you can join the C. I.’s.”

“What in the world is that?” demanded Eugenia eagerly.

“I believe the meaning’s to be a secret for a while,” Straight
explained solemnly, “but if you have a doll you can belong; that I’m
sure of. We’ve got ours here.” She patted Rosa Marie, and pointed to
Georgia’s ungainly parcel. “It’s sure to be fun. Anyway, we’re all for
it.”

“It sounds just splendid,” declared Eugenia, who still had aspirations
toward intimacy with the jolliest, most exclusive crowd in Harding.
“It’s lovely of you to tell me about it. Can anybody--can I tell my
friends?”

The conspirators exchanged glances. Democracy would repel Eugenia. To
her the C. I.’s must be made to appear highly exclusive.

“Ye-es,” Fluffy said at last. “It’s for anybody--that is anybody you’d
ask. The dolls have got to be dressed by day after to-morrow, you
know. Straight’s is going to be a perfect wonder. We’re thinking of
having a doll-show later, so you’d better take some pains with yours.
Good-night.”

“I wonder if the stores are closed yet,” added Straight loudly as
Eugenia started off. “I ought to have bought some real lace for Rosa
Marie’s petticoat.”

“Let’s go back, even if we are late to dinner,” declaimed Georgia
distinctly. “By to-morrow everybody in the place will be rushing down
for dolls and dolls’ dresses, and they’ll be dreadfully picked over.”

The conspirators paused to watch the effect of their sallies, and
subsided, overcome with mirth, on the Music Building steps, when little
Eugenia walked more slowly, halted, and finally turned down the hill
toward Main Street.

“She’s not going to be at the tail of any procession of Complete
Idiots,” chuckled Georgia. “Oh, I say, here comes Christabel Porter!
Let’s tackle her.”

Christabel Porter was a lanky, spectacled senior with a marvelous
memory, a passion for scientific research, a deep hatred of persons
who misnamed helpless infants, and a whole-hearted contempt for the
frivolity of the Dutton twins and their tribe. She respected Georgia,
making an exception of her because she always wore her hair plain and
never indulged in any kind of feminine furbelows.

“No use,” objected Fluffy. “Let’s go along to dinner so we can get
through and begin on Rosa Marie’s clothes.”

“We’ve got all night,” said Georgia easily, “if we need it. Let’s have
a try at the impossible. Hello, Christabel. Have you been buying one
too?”

Christabel squinted near-sightedly at the trio. “Oh, it’s you,” she
said. “What on earth are you doing up here on those cold steps, when
it’s past six already?”

“Talking to you,” Fluffy told her sweetly, holding the Esquimaux
up against the western light and smoothing the baby’s skirts
ostentatiously.

Christabel squinted harder. “Dolls!” she scoffed at last. “What on
earth are you up to now?”

“Georgia’s is the biggest,” said Straight sulkily. “Tell her about the
C. I.’s, Georgia. You were the one that thought of it. It’s nothing to
blame us about.”

Christabel listened to the tale in bewildered silence. At the
conclusion she gave a deep sigh. “Count me in,” she said. “I’m thinking
of taking a Ph. D. in psychology at Zurich next winter. I guess this
is as good an experiment on the play instinct as I’m likely to run up
against.” She sighed again deeply. “Of all the queer unaccountable
reactions! If it was after midyears, perhaps I could understand it,
but now---- Don’t tell any one else that I’m studying it, please; they
wouldn’t be quite natural if they knew. Where do you buy dolls?”

That evening the Belden House was in a flutter of excitement. The
Dutton twins were in Georgia’s room with the door locked. Fluffy’s
dolls were reposing on her bed, carefully pillowed on two lace-edged
sachets. The doll’s house was delivered about eight o’clock, and most
of the paper was torn off it in some way or other before Fluffy saw
it. Georgia sternly refused to open the door to any one. The sound of
cheerful conversation, laughter, and little squeals of pleasurable
excitement floated out over the transom. Plainly the Dutton twins
and Georgia Ames were not studying Logic--or they were studying it
after peculiar methods of their own. Furthermore, Fluffy’s note-book
was lying conspicuously on her table, and Barbara West had borrowed
Georgia’s, and was almost in tears over its owner’s curt refusal to
come out and explain what Barbara angrily described as “two pages of
hen scratches about undistributed middle, and that was just what I
didn’t get!”

When the quarter to ten warning-bell jangled through the Belden House
halls, Georgia threw her room hospitably open. With magic celerity it
filled up with curious girls, who stared in amazement at the spectacle
of Straight Dutton rocking a huge doll to sleep, laughed at Wooden’s
mussy wig and checked gingham apron--“Exactly like the ones I used to
have to wear,” Georgia explained pathetically, “and the other girls
laughed at me just that way”--and noisily demanded explanations of
the absurd trio’s latest eccentricity. Next morning alarm clocks went
off extra early, Main Street swarmed with Belden House girls on a
before-chapel quest for dolls, the toy-shop proprietor telegraphed a
hurry order to the nearest doll factory, and surreptitious examination
of queer, hunchy bundles broke the tension of the Logic quiz and
blocked the hallways between classes.

That afternoon there were doll-dressing bees at every campus house, and
Fluffy’s doll-tea in Jack o’ Hearts’ stall was the centre of interest
at the Tally-ho Tea-Shop.

A pleasant vagueness about the C. I.’s continued to pervade the
speech of its founders. Nobody seemed to know exactly where or when
the first meeting would be held. But, quite irrespective of the club
or the mystic time-limit imposed for membership, the doll fad took
possession of Harding. It was a red letter day for the conspirators
when the junior class president, an influential young person who prided
herself on her independence of character, appeared on the platform at
class meeting, with her doll in her arms. The college poetess, who
went walking alone and had had several of her verses printed in a real
magazine--sure signs of genius--took her darling doll to call on the
head of the English Department, with whom she was very intimate. A maid
who went to the door with hot water for the tea declared “cross her
heart” that she saw Miss Raymond with the doll on her lap, undressing
it, “just like any kid.” However that might have been, the poetess
continued to be great friends with Miss Raymond; evidently the doll
episode had not “queered” her with that august lady.

So the doll wave swept the college. Spreads became doll parties, French
lingerie was recklessly cut up into doll dresses, girls who had never
sewed a stitch in their lives labored over elaborate doll costumes, and
on warm October afternoons the campus resembled a mammoth doll market,
with Paradise as an annex for exclusive little parties. Tennis matches
and basket-ball games were watched by doll-laden spectators, and some
of the best athletes actually refused to go into their autumnal class
meets because it took too much time when the doll parties were so much
more fun.

Christabel Porter showed Georgia, in strict confidence, the tabulated
results of her observations.

“Insane, one,” it read; “still infantile, all freshmen, nearly all
sophomores, many juniors and seniors; slavish copy-cats, practically
all the rest of the college; can’t be accounted for, three.”

“The one,” she explained, “is the college poetess, and the three are
you and the Duttons. You’re not infants, you’re not stupid, you’re not
exactly crazy, you’re far from being copy-cats. I don’t understand you
at all.”

“You never will, Christabel,” Georgia told her sweetly, “no matter if
you take a dozen Ph. D.’s in Psych. at Zurich. But you shall presently
understand the C. I.’s. There is a meeting in my room to-morrow at two.”

“Won’t it be rather crowded?” inquired Christabel anxiously, glancing
around Georgia’s particularly minute and very much littered “single.”

Georgia smiled enigmatically. “Oh, it won’t take long, I think. It
means so much red tape to arrange for a more official place, like the
gym or the Student’s Building hall. The back campus would do, only the
weather man says rain for to-morrow.”

Next morning Georgia and the Duttons cut Logic (except Straight, who
dared not), Lit., and Zoölogy lab.

By noon Georgia’s walls were ablaze with effective decorations.
“Complete Idiots,” printed in every color of the rainbow, was
interspersed with sketches of every conceivable type of girl playing
with every possible variety of doll. Straight could draw, if she could
not adorn a Logic class. Fluffy and Georgia sighed to think that other
people’s “memorabils” would be enriched with these fascinating trophies.

At a few minutes before one Straight and Fluffy slipped
unostentatiously down-town in the rain to have lunch at a small new
place where there would be no gamut of inquiry to run about the
afternoon’s plans. Georgia meanwhile locked her door and waited until
the house was at lunch, when she let herself out, posted a sign,
reading, “Please don’t disturb until two o’clock,” hurried down-town
by a back way, and joined the Duttons just in time to gobble a sandwich
or two before the next train to the Junction.

On the station platform they met Madeline and Babbie Hildreth.

“Where are you going?” demanded Madeline.

“To the big city to buy Georgia a turban swirl,” Fluffy told them with
a smile.

“I thought your C. I. blow-out was to-day,” said Madeline innocently.

“Oh-ho!” cried Georgia. “So you do take some interest in our society,
though you haven’t appeared to. You’ll take more by to-morrow. Why
don’t you go to the meeting? You’ve just got time. I know they’d vote
to set aside the entrance requirements in favor of such distinguished
persons as yourselves.”

“But why----” began Babbie.

“Georgia can’t live another minute without a turban swirl,” jeered
Straight, climbing on to the train before it had fairly stopped.

“Tell all inquiring friends that we deeply regret not being able to be
present at the fatal moment,” added Georgia.

“Be a dear, Madeline, and go, so you can tell us how they took it,”
begged Fluffy.

“There are perfectly lovely souvenirs,” chanted the trio in chorus, as
their train pulled out.

The organizers of the C. I.’s witnessed part of the matinée. Georgia
and Straight bought a blue chiffon waist in partnership, and Fluffy,
from force of habit, bought a Chinese doll. They had an early dinner
to conform as far as possible to the rules about being chaperoned in
town after dark, and they arrived in Harding again, tired and damp but
expectant, soon after seven.

At the Tally-ho they stopped to find out, if possible, what sort of
reception they were likely to get further on. Madeline welcomed them
joyously.

“I went,” she said, “and I knew you’d want me to take charge in your
absence, so I did. Everybody who got a souvenir”--she pointed to hers,
decorating the wall back of the famous desk--“is happy. Others are
amused or wrathful according to the stage of development of their sense
of humor. Christabel Porter sent word that she understands you less
than ever. The poetess almost wept at such desecration of her idyllic
amusement. About two hundred girls came, and the rest of the college
either tried to and couldn’t get inside the Belden House door, or wept
at home because of their ineligibility. Mary Brooks wept too, because
her famous rumor stunt isn’t in it any longer with this gallery play
of yours. She wants you three to come to dinner to-morrow--Professor
Hinsdale is away--and tell her all about it.”

“Thanks,” said the trio nonchalantly.

“Don’t you think we’re pretty nearly smart enough to belong to the B.
C. A.’s?” demanded Georgia tartly at last.

“The B. C. A.’s?” repeated Madeline. “Oh, was that what you were
venting your beautiful sarcasm on? We thought you were hitting all
those new department societies that everybody is making such a silly
fuss about getting into.”

The trio exchanged glances.

“It was partly that,” admitted Georgia. “We’ve absolutely sworn off
from being in such things ourselves, or sending violets, except to
girls who make Dramatic Club or Clio--the real big honors, you know.”

“And have you also sworn off from going to the celebration dinners?”
inquired Madeline with a wicked smile.

“We haven’t decided about that,” Georgia informed her with dignity.
“But please don’t forget,” she added solemnly, “that your crowd began
this foolish club idea, and has done a lot to develop it. It was you
principally that we meant to hit off.”

Madeline grinned. “I really wish you were eligible to the B. C. A.’s,”
she said, “because then we could see how manfully you would resist
temptation. But it will be at least a year before you can any of you
possibly meet--well, we’ll call it the age limit. So don’t waste time
hunting over the bulletin-boards for a notice of your election.”

“We are generally considered rather frivolous,” Georgia told her
severely, “but we do stick to our principles--of which the anti-club
idea is one that we cherish greatly.”

“Though you’ve very recently acquired it,” murmured Madeline.

“Very,” agreed Georgia cheerfully. “Good-night.”

Outside the bewildered Dutton twins sorrowfully took Georgia to task
for spoiling forever their chances with the B. C. A.’s.

“Are you crazy?” demanded Straight.

“Don’t you remember why we started the whole doll business?” asked
Fluffy.

Georgia, who had been rather absent and constrained during the
afternoon’s adventures, gazed at them pityingly. “You little
innocents!” she said at last. “Can’t you see what she’s done for us?
Imagine the mud that two hundred girls have tracked through the Belden
House halls. Imagine the rage of the matron, and the things that some
of the faculty prigs will say about this whole business. I’ve been
worried to death all day, to tell you the truth. But now we don’t have
to care. We’re reformers. We’re disciples of the simple life, giving
demonstrations of the foolishness of over-organization. We’re sorry
about the mud and all that, of course. We’re--anyhow, I demand the
satisfaction of telling Christabel Porter the truth about us. I can’t
bear to have her explain us wrong, after all her trouble.” Georgia
splashed into a puddle and exclaimed angrily at the incident. “What in
Christendom can B. C. A. stand for?” she muttered wrathfully, stamping
off the mud.

“Who cares?” cried Straight, splashing into a puddle herself for sheer
bravado.

“Who indeed?” Fluffy took her up. “I’ve had a thought, Georgia. Let’s
keep on playing dolls. Then Christabel Porter can’t explain us at all.
She’ll be too mixed up to ever go to Zurich.”




CHAPTER VIII

MORE ARCHITECT’S PLANS, AND A MYSTERY


ONE lovely afternoon in late October, Jim Watson, arrayed in very
correct riding clothes, poked his head gingerly into Betty’s office,
and having thus made quite sure that she was alone, stepped briskly
inside and stood smiling quizzically down at her over the top of her
big desk.

“What’s the joke to-day?” Betty inquired, smiling frankly back at him.

“Same old joke,” said Jim, leaning his elbow comfortably on a pile of
pamphlets. “Small person with a generally frivolous appearance, sitting
at the biggest roller-top desk on the market, flanked on the right by
a filing cabinet and on the left by a typewriter. Vast correspondence
strewn over desk. Brow of small person puckered in deep thought. Dimple
of small----”

“That’s quite enough,” interrupted Betty severely. “I am not a joke,
except to really frivolous persons like you, and I refuse to have my
time wasted listening to such nonsense. Where’s Eleanor?”

Jim sighed deeply. “Where is Eleanor, indeed? Paying calls, known as
‘friendly visits,’ on the families of her Terrible Ten--her young
Italians. I thought she came up here to comfort and amuse my leisure
hours, but that’s certainly not what she’s staying on for. Is this your
day for office hours?”

“No-o,” Betty admitted doubtfully, “but I thought I’d stay and----”

“Please think again,” Jim coaxed in his most beguiling fashion. “It’s a
gorgeous afternoon. Please come for a ride.”

“But----”

“I’ve engaged Hartman’s best horses--the big bay for me and the little
black Queen, that you Harding girls are so crazy about, for you.”

“I thought Virginia Day had Queen every afternoon.”

“Not when I want her. I’m a privileged person at Hartman’s, because I
rode every day last summer.”

“Well, but you see----”

“If you come I’ll tell you a grand secret.”

“About Morton Hall?” demanded Betty eagerly.

“No fair guessing. Will you come?”

Betty looked at him hard, and then out the window at the campus,
sparkling in the autumn sunshine. “Oh, Jim, yes! I can’t resist such a
very nice party. How soon can we start?”

“How soon can you be ready?”

In a flash Betty had snapped down the lid of the absurdly big desk,
closed the filing cabinet, adjusted the typewriter top, and picked up a
book and her keys. “In ten minutes,” she said, bundling Jim out ahead
of her and locking the door. “If you should have to wait, you can be
finding me a switch for a riding-crop. Mine’s broken. See you in ten
minutes.” And she was off down the hill to change her dress.

Jim watched her lithe little figure out of sight, and then strode off
to get the horses, whistling loudly. It was a triumph, even with the
assistance of Queen and the promise of a secret, to have lured Betty
Wales from her official duties for a whole long, sunshiny afternoon.

They galloped out of town at a pace to scandalize the sedate dwellers
on Elm Street. Where the road passed the Golf Club, under the
flickering shade of tall oaks, Betty drew up to a walk and leaned
forward to pat Queen’s glossy neck.

“That was perfectly splendid, Jim,” she declared. “Doesn’t it make you
wish you were a bird?”

“Makes me think I’m a bird when I go cross-country out in Colorado,
over a meadow of soft, springy turf, and then splash through a brook,
and out into the first real shade I’ve seen for a week, maybe. Makes me
wish I was a cow-puncher when I think of it now.”

“Then you couldn’t be the distinguished architect of Morton Hall,”
Betty reminded him gaily. “Tell me the grand secret, Jim.”

Jim looked disappointed. He had hoped she would forget about the
secret. “Oh, it’s not so much,” he said. “Only if your august Highness
wishes to eat her Thanksgiving dinner in Morton Hall, Morton Hall will
be ready for her.”

“Jim! How splendid! Are you perfectly sure?”

Jim nodded grimly. “I’ve slaved and I’ve made the men slave, and
we didn’t do it for the peppery Mr. Morton, either. We did it for
you, because you seemed to think a few days would make such a big
difference. Well, they do--in a way, of course.”

“How do you mean?” asked Betty innocently.

“I mean,” declared Jim earnestly, “that I’m a self-sacrificing person,
if ever there was one. I’ve deliberately cut myself out of days and
weeks of good times here in Harding----”

“Oh, Jim!” Betty flashed him a merry smile. “Please don’t be silly. You
know you’re fond of your work and anxious to go where it takes you, and
just puffed up with pride to think that you’ve beaten the time limit
your firm had set. Why, Jim, Thanksgiving is only four weeks off!”

“I know it,” gloomily.

“And the list of Morton Hall girls isn’t half made out. The matron
will manage the moving-in, I suppose--arranging furniture and engaging
maids, and all. When can the moving-in begin, Jim?”

“Saturday before Thanksgiving,” still gloomily.

“We must have a grand housewarming,” Betty declared. “The B.C.A.’s
have decided on that already, but of course Madeline couldn’t have an
inspiration till she knew the date, so she could think of something
appropriate. A Thanksgiving housewarming will certainly be appropriate
for that house. You’ll stay for it, won’t you, Jim?”

“Thanks,” darkly.

Betty considered, frowning absently. “If it’s a costume party,--and
most of Madeline’s nicest ideas are--why, of course, you probably can’t
come. That will be a perfect shame, after the way you’ve worked. We’ll
have to have another special housewarming for you and Mr. Morton.”

“Thanks awfully.”

Jim’s horse seemed to be giving him a great deal of trouble. It had
edged to the extreme other side of the road and was curveting and
plunging nervously. Betty turned Queen to the other side after him.

“What’s the matter with Ginger?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Jim assured her coldly. “He’s just wondering whether
this is a real ride or only a political procession.”

Betty laughed and started Queen into a canter. “Why didn’t you say you
were tired of walking, silly?” she demanded. Then suddenly she had an
idea. “Of course you know I shall miss you, Jim,” she said. “We’re too
good friends to bother with saying things like that, when we both know
them.”

“Just as you say about that,” said Jim with a sudden return of his
smile. “But candidly now, Betty, aren’t you too busy to miss people
much?”

“When I’m too busy to have friends,” Betty told him earnestly, “I shall
just stop being busy. Life wouldn’t be worth living without friends.”

“But you’ve got such a lot, haven’t you?” Jim asked, idly flicking at
the scarlet sumach leaves with his crop. They were walking again now.

“Any college girl has a lot, and any college man. Haven’t you?”

Jim nodded. “I was just thinking that one, more or less----”

“Jim!” Betty’s tone was highly indignant. “You’re fishing! But you
act so blue to-day, and you’ve worked so hard for Morton Hall, that
I’ll just ask you a question. Which one of your good friends, ‘more or
less,’ doesn’t matter?”

Jim laughed. “You’re right, of course. I do get blue--it runs in the
family, I guess. Eleanor’s that way, too.”

“She’s not half as silly as you are,” laughed Betty. “But seriously,
Jim, I don’t know what I shall do when you go. You’re such a splendid
safety-valve. And then these glorious rides----”

“We’ve had only two----”

“There you go again,” sighed Betty. “Do you expect a busy person like
me to take whole afternoons off every single week? Oh, dear! Aren’t
those bittersweet berries on the vines growing over those little trees?”

“I don’t know anything about the habits or appearance of bittersweet
berries, but I’ll bring you some.”

He was back in a few minutes with a bunch of the pretty red berries.
Betty looked at them closely. “Oh, it is bittersweet!” she cried.
“Madeline and Emily want some most dreadfully for the copper jar at the
Tally-ho. Could we carry a few sprays back, do you think?”

“Carry a bushel, if you like,” Jim declared. “But first--there’s a
trail up there that starts off through the woods. What do you say to
trying it?”

They rode as far as they could under the red and yellow boughs, and
when the trail stopped Jim discovered a grove of walnut trees, and
Betty declared that proved they were almost up Walnut Mountain. So
they tied the horses and climbed the rest of the way, up a steep,
pebbly path, hearing a partridge whirr on the way and scattering a
whole family of lively little chipmunks who ran ahead of them, scolding
angrily at so unwarrantable an intrusion of their private playground.
They arrived panting at the top at last, and stayed so long looking at
the view that they felt obliged to run all the way down to the horses.
Then Jim showed Betty how to pack a “bushel” of bittersweet behind her
saddle for the Tally-ho, and tied another bunch on his for Morton Hall.
They cantered all the way home in the crisp, frosty dusk, and Jim, in
answer to Betty’s mocking inquiry about his blues, declared it had been
such a ripping afternoon that he believed they were lost forever in the
Bay of the Ploshkin.

Betty dined at the Tally-ho, with Madeline, Straight Dutton, and
Georgia.

“We’ve found a perfect Morton Hall-ite for you,” Georgia informed her
eagerly. “Just exactly the kind you want, and she hadn’t applied and
wasn’t going to.”

“Who is she?” demanded Betty. “And will she come?”

“Binks Ames didn’t ask her because she was afraid she’d muddle it,”
Georgia explained lucidly, putting the cart before the horse. “Binks
discovered her, and told us to tell you. She’s in the infirmary--Binks,
I mean, and the other girl, too. Got the mumps, Binks has, and
the other one had rheumatism or something. Binks is my freshman
cousin--the peculiar one from Boston. Her real name is Elizabeth B.
Browning Ames--after the poetess. Her mother goes in for Browning
classes and things, but Binks is the soul of prose.”

“Tell her about the Morton Hall-ite,” advised Straight. “Binks hasn’t
anything to do much with it.”

“That’s so,” agreed Georgia placidly, “but she’s rather an interesting
person, and Betty ought to meet her. She’s the kind that’s always
discovering things--just the way she discovered this girl.”

“Georgia,” declared Madeline amiably, “I always knew you had a
weakness, of course--all mortal creatures have. Now I’ve discovered
that it’s a weakness for family history. In order to start you on the
right track let me ask you a leading question. What are the Morton
Hall-ite’s name, class, and qualifications for admission?”

“Name unknown, class unknown, qualifications extreme general
forlornness, and a boarding place at the end of nowhere.”

“Where is that?” asked Betty smilingly.

“Oh, Binks didn’t dare ask,” explained Georgia. “You see Binks knows
she’s an awful blunderer at being nice to people.”

“Then how----” began Betty.

“Oh, that’s all arranged,” explained Georgia easily. “You can come with
me to-morrow when I go to see Binks, and if we explain a little to the
matron she’ll let you in to see the other one. Everybody is sorry for
her, because she seems so blue and forlorn, and never gets calls or
flowers or letters.”

“She sounds rather formidable, some way,” Betty demurred. “I think it
would be better for one of the faculty members of the board to go and
see her and ask her.”

“But I promised Binks I’d bring you. You can at least cheer up the
other one, and if you funk on asking her then you can send a faculty
later.”

“That reminds me that there isn’t going to be any too much ‘later.’”
Betty told them the great news, ending with, “So please plan a
scrumptious housewarming right away, Madeline.”

And Madeline promised, grumbling, however, about the constant
interruptions to which her aspiring genius was subject.

“You want a housewarming,” she wailed. “Eleanor wants a masque for
the Terrible Ten. Mary wants an alumnæ stunt for Dramatic Club’s June
meeting. Dick Blake wants a pantomime for the Vagabonds’ ladies’ night.
So it goes! And the worst of it is that the editors sternly refuse to
want anything of me--except the Sunday Supplement people, and they
want nothing but Vapor for the Vacant-Minded. I’m losing my mind--what
little I have--trying to make the articles sound silly enough.”

Betty went next day with Georgia to see Binks Ames, who proved to be a
thin, brown little freshman, with wonderful gray eyes and a friendly,
impulsive manner.

“It’s queer about me,” she told them. “I seem to attract freaks. All
my friends at school were queer unfortunates that my brothers fussed
at having to take around when they came to visit me. And now the first
thing I’ve done at Harding is to have mumps at the same time with Miss
Ellison, who writes poems----”

“Technically known as the C. P., or College Poet,” Georgia interrupted.

“And a queer scientific person with a bulging forehead and a squint,
named Jones. We weren’t any of us very sick, and we sat and talked
by the hour, and hit it off beautifully. And now they’ve gone”--she
lowered her voice-- “there’s the Mystery. We named her that because she
spooked around and never came near us, except by mistake. But the last
two days, since we’ve been here alone, we’ve become quite dangerously
chummy, and she’s told me things to make your heart ache.”

The sympathetic thrill in Binks’ voice explained sufficiently why
unfortunates always sought her out, and her next remark gave further
testimony to her real genius for friendship. “I never let them see
that I understand. It would scare them off. I act as if they were
like everybody else. Seeing that people know you’re a freak or an
unfortunate only makes you more of a one, don’t you think? But Georgia
has told me that you are the kind that can straighten things out--not
just let the poor things stick to you like burrs and try to make up to
them, the silly way I do. Now, Georgia, you’d better wait here. I’ll
take Miss Wales in to her myself, and then you’ll be an excuse for me
to get away and leave her there.”

The Mystery was crouching by a west window, looking out at Paradise,
with the low sun tangled in the yellow elms on the hill beyond. She
was tall and slight and stooped, with a muddy complexion and a dull,
expressionless face. She flushed uncomfortably when she saw them,
and received Binks’ stammered explanation about wanting to share her
callers with stolid indifference. Left alone with her, Betty remembered
Anne Carter, the girl with the scar, and wished she had made Binks tell
her what in this girl’s life had left her so frightened and hopeless
and so bitterly reticent. She was a junior. She lived on Porter
Hill--about a mile from the campus. She didn’t mind the walk; you could
count it in your exercise hours. She was not particularly interested
in any study; she just took what seemed best. If you meant to teach it
wasn’t wise to specialize too much; you might have to take a position
for Latin or Algebra when you had applied for History. She would
prefer to teach English herself. Betty had brought Binks a new “Argus”
to read. She asked the Mystery--her name was Esther Bond--if she had
seen Helena Mason’s new story.

“It’s awfully clever,” she said. “All her stories sound so knowing,
some way, as if she had seen and done lots of unusual story-book sort
of things. They have what Miss Raymond calls atmosphere and the note of
reality.”

“Yes,” said Miss Bond.

“She’s in your class, isn’t she?” Betty rattled on. “Do you know her?”

“Yes, I know her.”

“Is she really as unusual and fascinating as her stories seem?” Betty
pursued.

“I consider her one of the most commonplace girls in Harding,” said
Miss Bond stolidly.

“Well, at least you’ve at last said something besides yes and no,”
Betty reflected, and turned the talk to Binks, the infirmary régime,
and finally to campus life.

When at last, having decided that nothing was to be gained by delay,
she made her suggestion about Miss Bond’s coming into Morton Hall, the
Mystery laughed a queer, rasping laugh.

“I knew that’s what you were getting at,” she said. “You’re the new
secretary. I’m not so out of things that I don’t know that.”

“And you’ll come?” Betty asked cordially.

“I think not. I’d rather be out of the campus fun altogether than in it
on charity.”

Betty explained as tactfully as possible the difference between what
she called Mr. Morton’s kindness and what was sometimes meant by
charity, and suggested a few of the advantages to be gained from living
on the campus for a while.

The Mystery listened apathetically.

“Well, it doesn’t matter much what I do. Perhaps I may as well come.
Only is there a room that I can have off by itself somewhere? I
couldn’t stand being tumbled in with a stranger, or having my door open
right against hers.”

“Then,” said Betty eagerly, “you shall have the tower room. It’s
so much by itself that I told Mr. Watson--he’s the architect in
charge--that I was afraid no girl would dare to sleep alone there.
It’s like an island surrounded by linen closets, and then being in a
tower it juts out quite away from everything else. And it’s the very
prettiest room in the house,” she added enthusiastically.

Miss Bond didn’t know that she cared much how it looked.

“I’ll let you know in a day or two how I decide,” she said. “I should
have to see--there are some things to consider. Do you know if the
junior novel course has a written lesson to-morrow?”

Betty didn’t know, and neither did Georgia, whom she applied to for the
information; but she promised to find out and let the Mystery know by
telephone. Miss Bond thanked her with the first touch of real feeling
she had shown that afternoon.




CHAPTER IX

MOVING IN


BETTY WALES, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her trim little
figure enveloped in one of her famous kitchen aprons, stood on a
chair in the china closet of Morton Hall, covering the top shelves
neatly with sheets of white paper. One of the three richest men in New
York, very damp and red in the face from his exertions, was screwing
in hooks for pots and pans in the pantry next door. A rising young
architect was helping the pretty wife of a distinguished psychology
professor wash dishes, ready to put on Betty’s carefully spread papers.
A would-be literary light was hanging pictures on the softly-tinted
walls of the house parlor. Up-stairs Georgia, Babbie, and Eugenia Ford
were superintending the efforts of the night-watchman and a janitor
to arrange a bed, a bureau, a wash-stand, a desk, and two chairs to
the best advantage in rooms guaranteed by the rising young architect
aforesaid to be perfectly capable of holding those articles,--or, in
the case of double rooms, twice the number.

Betty Wales wasn’t very tall, and the shelves were high and very,
very long. Her arms ached from stretching; her back was tired from
spreading innumerable rugs; her brain reeled with dozens of petty but
important details. But she worked on doggedly, pushing back her curls
wearily when they got in her eyes, ordering, coaxing, or bullying her
distinguished assistants, her mind intent on one thing: Morton Hall
must be ready for the girls when they came to-morrow.

It was all because the matron had sprained her wrist--this hurry and
scurry and confusion at the last minute. She had hoped every day to be
able to come on and take charge of the settling, and from day to day
they had waited, until finally Prexy, realizing that they had waited
much too long, had asked Betty to take charge in her place. The matron
was coming that afternoon at five, with her arm still in a sling. Betty
had promised to meet her. Jim Watson was keeping track of the time,
and Mr. Morton’s car would be ready to take her to the station. At
distractingly frequent intervals the door-bell rang, and Mary Brooks
Hinsdale had to stop wiping dishes to answer it. In the end Betty
always had to go, but Mary saved her time and anxiety about appearances
by finding out who each visitor was.

“Never mind the smut on your left cheek,” she would say. “It’s only
another person come to apply for a job as waitress, and she’s much too
untidy herself to notice a small smut.”

Or, “This time you must take off your apron, Betty. It’s Prexy--he says
he’ll only keep you a minute, but it’s important.”

Or, “A strange looking freak of a girl, Betty. If she hadn’t acted so
completely scared, I’d have said you couldn’t be bothered. She looked
as if she might jump into the next county if I suggested taking you her
message.”

And each time Betty smilingly hopped off her chair, greeted her visitor
as cordially as if she was not feeling--to quote Mary Brooks--exactly
like a cross between a reckless ritherum and a distracted centipede,
and got back to her shelves as soon as she could possibly manage it,
stopping on the way to encourage Mr. Morton, hurry Madeline, and warn
Jim to wipe the dishes dry.

[Illustration: “YOU MUST TAKE OFF YOUR APRON”]

“Everything must be spick and span,” she insisted, “to start us off
right.”

At last Jim called “Four-forty-five, Betty,” and she jumped down
again and ran to her room--the only place in the house that hadn’t
been settled a bit--to dress. But she was so tired that she ended by
unceremoniously borrowing Eleanor’s fur coat to put on over her mussy
linen dress, and ordered Jonas to take her for a restful little spin up
Elm Street. And so she managed to be all smiles and sparkles and pretty
speeches of welcome for the matron, who was a nice motherly lady with
the loveliest snow-white hair, and a sense of humor that twinkled out
of her blue eyes and discovered everything comical about Betty--even to
the mussy linen under the borrowed elegance--before Jonas had seen to
the baggage and rushed his passengers up to Morton Hall.

As Betty opened the door shrieks of mirth floated out to them from the
matron’s rooms.

“Excuse me one minute, Mrs. Post,” she said hastily, “while I see if
everything is ready for you.”

The whole company of “Settlers,” as Madeline called them, not excepting
the under-janitor and the night-watchman, were gathered in Mrs. Post’s
cozy sitting-room.

“Where is she?” demanded Jim eagerly, when Betty appeared.

“Didn’t she come after all?” asked Georgia disappointedly.

“We’ve got ready the loveliest chorus of welcome,” explained Madeline,
with a complacent wave of the hand at her fellow workers. “A Settlers’
Chorus, with solos by some of the most distinguished Settlers.
Now, Betty, don’t look so horrified. Any sensible matron will be
tremendously flattered by such a unique attention.”

“It’s perfectly respectable, Betty,” Mary Brooks Hinsdale assured her,
“and Mr. Morton and Mr. Watson and the night-watchman will never have
another chance to be in a Harding show.”

“What’s that?” demanded Mr. Morton, who had been so engrossed in
studying his part that he had not noticed Betty’s arrival. “I’ve heard
a great deal about Harding shows, but I certainly never expected to be
in a troupe. Bring on your audience, Miss B. A., or I shall forget my
lines.”

There was no use arguing. “All right,” agreed Betty, “only please
remember that she’s a stranger to Harding ways, and don’t do anything
to shock her too much. While the entertainment is going on, I’ll make
us all some tea.”

But nobody would listen to that proposition for a minute. Betty, being
herself chief Settler, must hear the Settlers’ Chorus. It ended by
Mr. Morton’s summoning Jonas to make the tea--each Settler having
unselfishly insisted upon being the one to do it. But Jonas was so
entranced by the sight of his master singing a doggerel stanza in
praise of the Admirable Architect, to a tune that he fondly supposed
to be “A Hot Time,” that he let the water boil over to begin with, and
then steeped the tea until it was bitter and had to be thrown away.

After Mr. Morton’s performance had been duly applauded, the
night-watchman sang to the Beneficent Benefactor, and Madeline sang to
the Courageous Captain, meaning Mrs. Post herself. The Daring Defender
was of course the night-watchman, glorified by Babbie as worthy of a
gift of “salad and ice and all things nice”--in memory of the supper
the three B’s had spilled on his head when they were freshmen. Madeline
was the Esthetic Elevator because she hung pictures and planned
entertainments in a way to elevate the taste of the inmates, and Betty
was the Flossy Furbelow, who sat and watched other people work. The
alphabet ended with F, the chorus explained,

  “For Settlers must work
  While others may rhyme.
  We’d have gone farther
  If there had been time.”

But they had gone far enough to put Mrs. Post at her ease with
everybody. While fresh tea was being made by the contrite Jonas, the
Settlers escorted her triumphantly over her domain, and she praised
everything and thanked everybody and seemed to fit so beautifully into
the niche she had come to fill that Betty fairly danced with relief and
excitement. If only the girls caught the right spirit as easily!

But of course some of them didn’t. There was the Thorn, who roomed on
the ground floor next to Betty, and who ran in twenty times during the
first week to make an absurd complaint or ask an impossible favor.
There was the Mystery up in her tower; she locked herself in so
ostentatiously that she offended her next door neighbor, who promptly
announced her intention of leaving such a “cliquey” house. There was
the Goop, whose table manners were only equaled by the fine disorder
of her apartment. She had been assigned to a double room, but she had
to be tactfully transferred to a single, on the tearful complaint of
her roommate; and more tactfully urged to pick up her possessions, and
not to eat with her knife. Then there were the Twin Digs, to whom the
ten o’clock rule was as if it had never been, and the Romantic Miss,
who professed bland and giggling innocence in regard to campus rules
about gentlemen callers. Jim named them all, except the Mystery, in the
last confidential chat that he and Betty had together, and he made her
promise solemnly to keep him informed of their escapades.

“For I feel like a sort of Dutch uncle to all the Morton Hall-ites,” he
explained. “May I run up once in a while to see how you are getting on?”

“May you? Will you?” was Betty’s enthusiastic response.

“There might be some little changes,” went on Jim boldly. “The only
real test of a house is to live in it a while. If there is anything
that doesn’t suit, you’ll let me know?”

Betty promised to do that also, and Jim departed, divided between
encouragement at Betty’s cordial invitation and her promise to write,
and a conviction that before he had shut the door she had forgotten
his very existence in rapt absorption in her official plans and
perplexities.

The housewarming was a “Madelineish” success--that was foreordained--in
spite of the Mystery’s refusal to attend it, the Thorn’s loud
declaration that it was an absurd idea, and the Goop’s first
using part of her costume for a dusting cloth and then losing it
all in the unfathomable depths under her bed. Of course it was
absurd--deliciously absurd--the Thanksgiving of the Purple Indians.
The Purple Indians lived in blue tents in the depths of a pink forest.
Their clothes were travesties of the latest shades and modes. They
were thankful for the beautiful color-scheme of their world, for the
seclusion and leisure of their lives. Presently they were discovered by
a band of New Women, who converted them to suffrage, dress-reform, and
the pursuit of culture, and marched them off to a Female College where
they could live to learn--not to eat and to dress. There were sly local
hits at the doll fad, the faculty’s latest diversions, the department
societies, the frivolities of Harding life in general.

With a few exceptions the Morton Hall girls entered into the affair
with spirit, making friends over the rehearsals and committee meetings,
displaying much executive ability, and encouraging Betty to feel that
in spite of some small disappointments in the character of a few of
those who had been chosen, most of the Morton Hall-ites were fine
girls, well worthy the help they were receiving in such generous
measure.

The Mystery fully justified her title. She was a bundle of
contradictions. In spite of her curious craving for isolation, she
seemed hungry for friendship and sympathy. She was painfully anxious
for a part in the play and surprised Madeline by suggesting a clever
little scene to be added to it; but all of a sudden she declared
the scene would be too silly, refused to write it out, and was with
difficulty persuaded to keep her part in the performance.

She seemed to have made no friends in her three years of college life,
and she assured Betty forlornly that there was no one she cared to ask
to the play. But when Betty told Binks Ames, and Binks humbly begged
for an invitation, the Mystery acted frightened and embarrassed, and
disappeared the minute the play was over, leaving Binks to spend the
rest of the evening as best she might.

“I think she’s your kind,” Betty told Mrs. Post. “I’ll poke up the Goop
and console the Thorn, if you’ll try to clear up the Mystery--and cheer
her up too.”

So Esther Bond found herself repeatedly invited into Mrs. Post’s
cheerful little sitting-room for tea and a good talk in the dusk of the
afternoon. Often just before ten Mrs. Post would tap on the tower room
door, and step in for a cheerful inquiry about “lessons” and a friendly
good-night. At first the Mystery resented these intrusions as spying on
her jealously guarded seclusion. She accepted Mrs. Post’s invitations
sulkily because she could not well refuse, and sat, glum and silent, in
the chair farthest from her hostess, as though intent on preventing all
intruders from scaling her wall of reserve.

But gradually she melted. Mrs. Post was so friendly, so impervious to
sulks and melancholy. It was so evident that her interest had nothing
to do with curiosity--that she knew and cared nothing about the
Mystery’s place in the college world. Best of all, she never referred
to the Mystery’s habit of locking her door; she might never have
noticed it from her unconscious manner.

One night the Mystery sat down quite close to Mrs. Post, and the
feeling of intimacy that comes from sitting close together in the
firelight unsealed her lips. She told Mrs. Post about her lonely
childhood spent on her grandfather’s farm.

“He was awfully poor,” she explained. “The farm was mortgaged, and
everything was old and forlorn and coming to pieces. Once the Humane
Society officers arrested him for driving a lame horse to town. I was
with him. I remember how ashamed I was. I begged him to let me go back
and live with my mother. Then at last he told me that mother was dead,
and that my father had treated her cruelly and had refused to take care
of her ‘brats.’ I shall never forget the sting of that word. It drowned
out the shame of being arrested for cruelty to animals. Well, the next
year the mortgage was foreclosed and the farm sold. The shame of that
killed my grandfather. My grandmother went to the poorhouse, and I went
to work for a family in the village, where I could earn my board and
have a chance to go to school. I used to think I’d like to teach.”

“Well, you can in a year more,” Mrs. Post told her cheerfully. “It’s a
noble calling.”

“I shall hate it all the same,” declared the Mystery fiercely.

“Oh, no, you won’t, child,” Mrs. Post told her, patting her shoulder
gently. “You mustn’t quarrel with your bread and butter. Who sends you
to Harding?”

“A woman I worked for once at home pays part of my expenses. I shall
return it all as soon as I can. That’s all I shall have to work for
now,” she added bitterly, “except bread and butter. My grandmother died
when I was a freshman.”

“Just let me read you the last letter I had from my daughter, who is a
nurse,” Mrs. Post would say at this stage of the Mystery’s confidences.
“Or no,” after a minute’s vain search for her reading glasses, “you
read it to me, dear.”

The daughter who was a nurse was a cheerful, placid creature, with a
simple, optimistic belief in the joy of life and the nobility of her
profession. The Mystery enjoyed the letters in spite of herself, and
was divided between contempt and envy of the writer.

One night the Mystery crept shamefacedly down from her lonely tower
just to kiss Mrs. Post good-night. She found that good lady in a state
of joyous excitement over the engagement of the daughter who was a
stenographer.

“She is the oldest of the family,” she explained. “She’s helped me, and
helped keep the other girls in school, and given Bella nearly all the
money she needed for her nurse’s course. She’s worked hard, and she has
never complained. Now I hope she can have a nice easy time.”

“So do I,” said the Mystery heartily. “And, Mrs. Post, I’m going to try
not to complain and not to hate so many people and things. Maybe I can
find a bright side to life if I try. I guess you think I’m a grumbler,
but I’ve had a lot to make me one.”

“I know you have, dear,” Mrs. Post told her soothingly.

But the Mystery shook her head. “No, you don’t know, dear lady.
Nobody knows. I’ve never told you the real big trouble--I couldn’t.
Good-night.”

To Betty the Mystery continued cold and forbidding, and Betty wisely
decided to leave her to Mrs. Post.

“There are people I don’t especially like,” she reflected, “and of
course there are people who don’t like me. The Mystery is evidently
one of them. I must write Jim and tell him what a hit his tower room
makes with her, even if I can’t get near her.”




CHAPTER X

GHOSTS AND INSPIRATIONS


ONE snowy afternoon in December Dorothy, looking like a snowbird in her
gray coat powdered with big white flakes, flitted into Betty’s room and
without giving her sister a chance to say “How do you do?” burst out
with her great news.

“There’s such an excitement at school. Miss Dick just laughs, but Kitty
Carson thinks it was burglars, and we girls all think it was a ghost.”

“Goodness, what a beautiful excitement!” laughed Betty. “Tell me all
about it.”

“Well, you see Shirley Ware heard it first,” explained Dorothy, “and
she was so scared that she tried to scream. And all that came out was
a kind of a choke. It woke me up and then I heard it too--the other
noise, I mean. It was a queer little scratching and knocking on the
wall.”

“Mice, you silly child,” put in Betty wisely.

But Dorothy scorned such a theory. “I guess I know how mice sound,
after all I heard this summer, scurrying and hurrying inside our
cottage walls. Besides, mice don’t groan, Betty Wales. The next thing
we heard was a groan--an awfully sad sound, you know, Betty. It scared
me so that I tried to scream too, and the other two girls woke up.
They said I only made a little squeak,” explained the Smallest Sister
proudly, “and of course if I had really screamed Kitty Carson would
have heard, for all she sleeps so sound.”

“And what did the ghost do then?” asked Betty.

“It just groaned once more louder than ever, and then it stopped, and
everything was just awfully still. So I got into bed with Sarah and
Helen, and I s’pose I went to sleep. But Shirley was so scared that she
couldn’t move, and she stayed awake and saw it.”

“You mean she was so scared that she imagined that she saw it, dearie,”
Betty amended. “There aren’t any ghosts, you know, really and truly,
Dottie.”

“Well, there are burglars,” Dorothy insisted, “and anyway, it wasn’t a
mouse. And what Shirley saw was a tall white ghost with its hands over
its face--so.” Dorothy illustrated graphically. “And in the morning
we told Miss Dick, and she laughed, but Kitty Carson’s window has a
fire-escape, and she sleeps so sound that anybody could go in and out
that way. We know she is just as scared as we are because there’s a man
come this very afternoon to put bars on her window.”

“Well, then you’ll be quite safe to-night,” Betty assured her
comfortably. “Didn’t I ever tell you about our Scotch ghosts?”

“Yes, but please do it again,” begged Dorothy, “because I’ve most
forgotten, and then I can tell the girls. We’re so interested in ghosts
just now.”

So Betty told about the ghost that Madeline and Mr. Dwight had invented
to add the finishing touch to Babbie’s ancestral castle at Oban.
“Ghosts that little girls see are always like that,” she ended, “just
jokes that somebody has played for fun. If Shirley really saw anything
it was some big girl who’d dressed up on purpose to frighten you little
ones.”

“It couldn’t be.” The Smallest Sister’s tone was very positive.
“There’s a chimney next to our wall on Shirley’s side where the noises
were. No girl could crawl up a chimney. Nothing could get there but a
ghost.”

“Or a mouse,” interpolated Betty sceptically.

“Mice don’t groan,” Dorothy reminded her. “If it was a girl--but it
couldn’t be, because how could a girl get in the chimney?--and Miss
Dick ever finds out who it was, why, I shouldn’t care to be in her
shoes, I just guess! Shirley got so scared it made her sick. She’s gone
to the infirmary to-day.”

“When she comes back you’d better put your cot near to hers, so she can
reach out and wake you if she’s ever frightened again,” Betty advised.
“It was selfish of you three to get into one bed and leave her alone.”

“She could have come if she’d wanted to,” the Smallest Sister defended
herself. “We s’posed she wasn’t a bit afraid when she stayed where she
was, instead of her being too afraid to move.”

“Well, next time be more thoughtful,” Betty cautioned, and the
Smallest Sister promised, and prepared to hop-skip back to school.

“Frisky and I walk together this week”--she explained her brief
visit--“so I don’t want to miss a single walk. I can go walking with
you next week. Yes, I do hate two-and-two school walks ’most as much as
ever I did, but it’s different when I can walk with Frisky. I’ll come
again soon and tell you what we’ve discovered about the ghost,” she
called over her shoulder, as she vanished.

That evening the Thorn appeared in Betty’s room, wearing her most
provoking air--a combination of sympathy for Betty, offended dignity
for herself, and a grim pleasure in showing up the shortcomings and
inferiorities of her house mates.

“How did Mr. J. J. Morton make all his money?” she inquired, after
a few moments’ acrid criticism of the Purple Indian play, which had
just been successfully repeated, by request, for the benefit of the
Student’s Aid treasury.

“Why, I don’t know exactly,” Betty answered idly. “Railroads, I think,
and--and stocks and bonds. The same way other rich men have made their
money, I suppose.”

“I guess it’s tainted millions, all right.” The Thorn’s thin lips shut
tight, and her sharp eyes fixed Betty’s belligerently.

Betty only smiled at her good-humoredly. “Did you read Peggy Swift’s
article in the last ‘Argus’ on that subject? She makes you see how
all money is tainted, in a way. But Mr. Morton is as fair and upright
as he can be. He is splendid to the men who work for him, Mr. Thayer
says. And he spends most of his time nowadays in superintending his
charities.”

“When he isn’t spending it squeezing some small competitor to the wall,
or whitewashing a corner,” added the Thorn sententiously.

Betty considered this speech in bewildered silence. Her ideas of
political economy were very hazy. Was it always wrong to get rid of
competition, if you were smart enough to do it? she wondered. What in
the world did a “corner” have to do with tainted money, and why should
Mr. Morton be blamed for any interest he might have in a thing as
innocent and necessary as whitewash?

“I didn’t think you’d have anything to say to that,” the Thorn
proceeded triumphantly, after a minute. “Besides, I’ve got proof of
every word I say. We aren’t going to be happy in this house. It’s
haunted--by the spirits of those he has wronged, I suppose.”

“Matilda Thorn--I mean Jones,” began Betty, letting Jim’s name pop
out before she thought, in her annoyance, “don’t be so ridiculous. I
can’t argue about Mr. Morton’s business methods because I don’t know
enough about them, and neither do you. But President Wallace does, and
he accepted this house very gladly for Harding College. Furthermore,
you accepted a place in it very gladly--yours was the first name on
my list. So I think it is very inconsistent of you, as well as very
ungracious, to criticize Mr. Morton now. But when you talk about this
house being haunted you are simply making yourself ridiculous. Please
explain what you mean by saying such a thing.”

The Thorn listened to Betty’s stern arraignment with growing amazement.
She had “sized up” the new secretary as “one of the pretty, easy-going
kind,” and had vastly enjoyed worrying her with ill-grounded
complaints, which had always been treated with a sweet seriousness that
the Thorn had found very diverting. Now she realized that she had gone
too far, and she rose to retreat, rallying her scattered forces into a
semblance of order.

“I’m sorry I’ve offended you, Miss Wales,” she said humbly. “I didn’t
remember that Mr. Morton was a friend of yours. I haven’t any friends
of his sort--he seems to belong in another world from mine. I didn’t
mean to be rude--or ungrateful--or ridiculous.”

Betty held out her hand impulsively. Being perfectly sincere and simple
herself, she could never have guessed at the strange complexity of
motives that actuated the Thorn. “Then if you didn’t mean it, it’s
all right,” she said. “So please sit down and tell me what you think
Mr. Morton has done that isn’t honest, and I’ll ask him about it--or
I’ll ask President Wallace to explain it to us. And then tell me what
makes you say that Morton Hall is haunted.” Betty’s sense of humor
nearly overcame her dignity at this point, and the last word ended in
a chuckle that she hastily converted into a cough. Ghosts seemed to be
dogging her path to-day.

The Thorn sat down again majestically. “Well,” she began uncertainly,
“I’m not sure that I know anything in particular about Mr. Morton’s
methods. All great fortunes are founded on trickery, in my opinion. A
great many other people seem to think so too, according to all that you
read. And when the girls on the top floor began to hear ghosts walking
and talking and unlocking locked doors, why, I suppose I put two and
two together--that’s all. Some way you always associate ghosts with
wicked men. Of course it might be Miss Bond who was haunted, instead of
Mr. Morton’s money.”

“But Miss Jones,” broke in Betty in amazement, “you don’t really
believe in ghosts, do you? My little sister has just been here with a
story of how some of Miss Dick’s girls were frightened last night by
mysterious noises. It’s bad enough for children as big as she is to
think they’ve seen ghosts, but for Harding girls----”

The Thorn shrugged her shoulders dubiously. “That’s what I said myself
when I first heard about it, but yesterday in evening study-hour I
was up there, and we certainly heard the queerest whisperings and
mutterings coming from the tower room. We were sure Miss Bond was in
there alone, so we knocked to see if she was sick or wanted anything.
She didn’t answer, and we finally tried the door and it was locked, as
usual. So we banged and banged, and we were just going to call Mrs.
Post when Miss Bond finally came--and she was all alone and hadn’t been
studying elocution or reading her Lit. out loud. She said she hadn’t
heard anything either, except the racket we made, but I noticed she
didn’t act much as if she meant it. She’s so secretive she’d keep even
a ghost to herself, probably,” ended the Thorn vindictively.

Betty advanced the mice-in-the-walls theory, only to have it scoffed
aside, with a variation of the Smallest Sister’s argument: “Mice do not
whisper and mutter; they scramble and squeak.” She suggested that the
sounds came from another study; that had been carefully investigated.
She hastily dismissed the suspicion that the Mystery had misled them
about being alone. In the first place she felt sure that the Mystery
was honest; in the second place the Thorn, as if reading her thoughts,
explained how they had hunted through the closet and even looked under
the bed.

“Well, you will have to keep your ghosts, then,” Betty laughed finally.
“Only don’t throw the blame on poor Mr. Morton or on Miss Bond, who
didn’t hear anything. Why, maybe it’s you they’re haunting. The people
who hear things are the ones to worry about being responsible, I should
say.”

The Thorn refused to turn the matter into a pleasantry. “They’ve all
heard the noises,” she explained, “the girls who room on the third
floor. They asked me to come up last night and see what I thought.”

“And then speak to me?” asked Betty, annoyed that the Thorn should have
been honored with an official mission.

“Well--if I thought best,” the Thorn admitted.

“All right,” said Betty cheerfully. “You can tell them what I’ve
said--particularly what I think about the silliness of believing in
ghosts. If they are troubled by any more noises, they can let me or
Mrs. Post know, and we’ll look into it.”

“People do get the queerest ideas into their heads,” she sighed, when
the Thorn had departed. “To-day it’s ghosts, ghosts everywhere, and
to-morrow it will be something else.”

To-morrow’s trouble, as it proved when to-morrow came, was
inspirations. Babbie had one--quite unrelated of course to the fact
that she and Mr. Thayer could not agree about the prettiest furnishings
for a library--to the effect that her mother was lonely and needed the
society of her only child. And Madeline had one, which took the form of
a plot for a drama that was certain to make Broadway “sit up and take
notice.”

“But, Madeline,” Betty begged, “you can write that later. It’s getting
very close to Christmas. You’ve got to take charge of the Tally-ho’s
gift-shop department again. The Morton Hall girls will help, but
they’re no good at planning. And neither am I.”

“Make the things we planned last year,” suggested Madeline promptly.

“You know that won’t do, Madeline,” Betty told her sternly. “All our
best customers have bought dozens of extra-special candle-shades and
Cupid cards and stenciled blotters. We can have some of those, for
freshmen or girls who didn’t get around to buy last year. But it will
all seem stale and left over and silly if we don’t have some grand new
specialties. Please, Madeline!”

Madeline frowned darkly and shook her head. “Ever since that tea-shop
was started, I have sacrificed my Literary Career to its needs. Now
I revolt. I’m going to write my play while I’m in the mood. If I
should finish before Christmas, why, then I’ll help with the gift-shop
business, not otherwise.”

“What shall I do?” sighed Betty. “The gift-shop pays splendidly. We
can’t let it go, because if we do we shall make less money than we did
last year, and then Mrs. Hildreth and Mrs. Bob would be disappointed.
Besides, I’ve been promising some of my girls a regular harvest from
it.”

“Mary Brooks invented a pretty candle-shade last year,” Madeline
reminded her. “Tell her that she’s the Perfect Patron, and must dress
the part. Command her to come to the rescue of the gift-shop.”

“I shall ask her to come and talk to you,” Betty murmured under her
breath.

But even Mary’s lively arguments left Madeline unmoved.

“If it was an order that you’d had for a play,” Mary told her calmly,
“I wouldn’t say a word. But you’re only wasting your time on a forlorn
hope, just when you might be doing something really useful. I shall
cross my thumbs at you and your old play.”

“You may cross your thumbs all you want to,” Madeline defied her
smilingly. “Before the winter is over you’ll be sitting in a box at my
Broadway opening--that is, if I’m magnanimous enough to ask you, after
all the beautiful encouragement you’re giving me.”

“But, Madeline”--Mary was nothing if not persistent--“what makes you
think you can write a play, when all your stories have come back,
except a few of those college ones? A play is any amount harder to
write than a short story.”

Madeline smiled back at her confidently. “Maybe I agree with you,
little Mary. But in the first place every Tom, Dick and Harry is
writing good short stories nowadays, and nobody is writing extra good
plays. In the second place, I have discovered the secret of writing
natural but amusing dialogue.”

“And I suppose you know all there is to be known about stage-craft,”
added Mary, in her most sarcastic tones.

“I’ve seen every good thing in New York ever since I could talk,”
Madeline announced calmly. “Besides, I am going down to New York later
to look up the stage business. But first I’m going to get the play all
written. I’m afraid the original touch would tumble out if I carried it
to New York in my head. And then,” she added mysteriously, “I couldn’t
use my secret method about dialogue so well in New York.”

“Madeline Ayres,” Mary told her solemnly, “you are the most provoking
person I know. You have mooned around here all the fall, doing footless
little stunts for anybody that asked you. Now, when Betty and the
Tally-ho need you, you are under the spell of the most untimely
inspiration that I’ve ever heard of your having.”

“I guess the Vagabonds would like to hear you call the Pageant I wrote
for them footless,” declared Madeline in injured tones, “and if any
college play ever took better than the Purple Indians----”

“Of course your stunts are all perfectly lovely,” Mary hastened to
assure her. “You’re the most provoking but also pretty nearly the most
interesting of all the B. C. A.’s. Isn’t she, Betty? I’ll cross my
thumbs for your play instead of against it, Madeline.”

“Thanks,” said Madeline briefly. “I’m writing it for Agatha Dwight.”

Betty and Mary exchanged glances of utter amazement. Agatha Dwight
was the idol of Harding and of two continents besides. The leading
playwrights of England and America wrote for her, and the greatest of
them felt highly honored when her capricious taste singled out a piece
of his for production.

“And the moral of that is,” said Mary at last, “aim at a star, because
it’s no disgrace if you miss her. Pun not noticed until it was too late
to withdraw the epigram. Come on, Betty, and fix up the workroom. It’s
lucky that George Garrison Hinsdale is writing another of his horribly
learned papers this month, so I can be down here as much as I like.
This one is on the aberrations of Genius. I shall suggest untimely
inspirations as an important subhead, and invite Madeline up to discuss
it with him. Meanwhile our only hope is that she’ll get sick of her
play and come to our rescue, and do you know, Betty Wales, I shall be
most desperately disappointed if she does.”

Betty laughed. “I suppose she oughtn’t to waste her time on fussy
little things like gift-shop specialties if she can really do big
things like plays for Agatha Dwight. But she is so splendid at
everything.”

“And the moral of that is,” said Mary, “be splendid at everything and
you’ll be wanted, no matter how provoking you are at times. I should
like to have been a genius myself, only George Garrison Hinsdale says
he prefers near-geniuses as wives. Now, Betty Wales, what do you say to
a ploshkin candle-shade for this year’s extra-special feature?”




CHAPTER XI

WHAT CHRISTMAS REALLY MEANS


THE Terrible Ten began it. Eleanor Watson had forgotten to bring either
peanuts or taffy to their class, and the Arithmetic lesson flagged in
consequence, until finally, in despair, she sent Rafael out to buy some
refreshments.

“How’s your father to-night, Pietro?” she asked, while they waited.
Pietro Senior had slipped on the ice on his way home from work and
sprained his wrist badly.

“Better, I tink,” Pietro reported stolidly, his thoughts all on peanuts
to come.

“Dat’s nottings--lit’ wrist splain,” Giuseppi announced. “My fader, he
had a hand cut off--so.”

“My fader go to de hospital. Hava big cutting.” Nicolo illustrated a
“big cutting” vividly with a dangerous swing of his villainous-looking
jack-knife.

“My moder she hava two operations dis year.”

“My sister she have tree.”

Rafael had arrived during the debate, but not even the bag of peanuts
he set down before Eleanor could distract attention from the bitter
rivalry in misfortune. In a minute Rafael too had caught the trend of
it.

“Waita lil minute,” he cried, glowering angrily round the circle.
“Looka my hand. Dat’s one. My lil sister she died dis year. My muvver
she go to hospital. And my big sister, she work to Cannon’s fer der
Christmas trade. She say she rather die, she so tired every night, an’
it get worse an’ worse an’ worse every day till it be Christmas.”

“Dat so,” agreed Pietro solemnly. “My sister she work dar too. Doan get
home till ten, leben o’clock.”

Cannon’s was the big cheap department store down near the station.
Eleanor took mental note of the Ten’s opinion of its treatment of
employees, and resolved to ask Mr. Thayer if the girls who worked there
really had such a hard time as their small brothers thought. Meanwhile
she stopped the ridiculous operation contest with many peanuts. The
Ten, being very bright boys, though ignorant of books, had speedily
discovered that the bigger numbers you could add right, the faster you
could secure large quantities of peanuts. Also, they humbly worshipped
the Lovely Lady, whom Rafael had refused to let them call “de peach.”
They came regularly to their class, they listened spellbound to the
adventures of Robin Hood, they wrote the names of Robin and all his
band--also their own and the Lovely Lady’s--without a slip, and when
Eleanor declared that nothing would make her so happy as to hear them
read the tale of King Arthur and his knights to her out of a book, they
set themselves at learning “dose queer book letters” with a will.

“First fellah dat bothers my Lovely Lada, I fixa him,” Rafael had
announced at the end of the third lesson.

“Why she your lovely lada?” demanded Pietro mockingly, dodging behind a
telegraph pole for safety.

“’Cause I lika her de most,” Rafael declared, “and she goan lika me de
most. You jus’ wait.”

But after that one assertion of proprietorship, he changed “my” to
“the,” and impressed the revision upon his friends and followers with
terrible threats. Rafael’s eyes were brown and melting, his voice was
of a liquid softness, his smile as sunny as the skies of his native
land. But when he scowled all the fierceness of Sicilian feuds and
vendettas flashed out of his deep eyes and straightened his mouth into
a cruel, hard line. No wonder the Ten shivered and cowered before the
wrath of Rafael, supplemented by the flash of a sharp little dagger
that Eleanor, who had been entirely reassured by Mr. Thayer, little
suspected the dearest of her dear, curly-haired comical Ten to be
carrying inside his gray shirt.

After the class that evening, Eleanor asked Mr. Thayer about Cannon’s.

“Well, I suppose they are pretty hard on their girls,” he said.
“Standing up all day waiting on tired, irritable customers who have to
make every penny count, with fifteen minutes off for lunch in the busy
season, can’t be exactly fun. Then in the evening I suppose they have
to go back to straighten up their stock of goods, move things around
to show them off better, trim up the windows, and so on. Christmas
means something quite different from a gay holiday with a big dinner
and a lot of pretty presents to those girls and to lots of others, Miss
Watson. If the Christmas rush is bad at Cannon’s, it must be perfect
torture in the big city shops.”

Next day Eleanor persuaded Madeline, who could always be detached from
her work to investigate a real novelty, to go with her to Cannon’s.

“If we want to ask the clerks any questions, you can do it safely
in Italian, or any other language,” Eleanor urged. “They’re mostly
foreigners, I think.”

Madeline nodded. “And I might find the type----” Her voice trailed off
into silence, and her face wore a far-away, inscrutable look. Writing
a play for Miss Dwight certainly made a person very absent-minded, and
one’s conversation very inconsecutive--also one’s actions. Madeline
suddenly decided to buy a hat, and dragged Eleanor from one shop to
another without finding anything to please her difficult taste, so that
it was almost dark when they reached Cannon’s.

The big store was packed with shoppers. The air was clammy and stale;
the counters were a mass of soiled and dingy merchandise. Tiny
cash-girls ran wearily to and fro, elbowing a difficult way through the
jam in the narrow aisles. Behind the counters pale-faced clerks eyed
the customers savagely, and attended with languid insolence to their
wants.

Eleanor sniffed the air daintily. “What an awful place, Madeline! Where
do all these shoppers come from? I don’t feel a bit as if I were in
Harding.”

“From Factory Hill, I suppose, and from across the tracks where the
French settlement is. Let’s go to the toy department and buy Fluffy a
doll. I’m sure they’ll have something unique to add to her collection.”

Eleanor stood near the door, hesitating. “It’s horribly smelly. You
don’t think we shall catch anything, do you?”

Madeline laughed. “You’d never do to go really and truly slumming,
Eleanor. No, we shan’t catch anything, probably. Come along. I thought
you wanted to investigate this place.”

So Eleanor bravely “came along.” They bought a penny doll for Fluffy,
from a sad-eyed little clerk who told them she was “tired most to death
working nights,” and then, when a floor-walker appeared suddenly from
around a corner, took it all back and declared loudly that business was
fine this year and she liked the rush of “somethin’ doin’.”

On the way down-stairs--Eleanor had firmly refused to get into one of
Cannon’s elevators--they came upon a girl crying bitterly.

“What’s the matter?” Madeline asked in the friendly, companionable way
that always got her answers.

“I’ve been fined again,” the girl sobbed. “Ten cents ain’t so much, but
neither is four dollars. That’s what I get. I’ve been fined three times
this week. What for? Why, once for being late in the morning--it’s
awful easy to sleep over when you’ve been working late at night--and
once for sitting down on the ledge behind the counter. It’s against the
rules to sit down, you know. And this time it was for talking back to
an inspector who said my check was wrong. It wasn’t. If it had been,
I’d have been fined for that.”

Eleanor had been hunting through her pocketbook.

“Please take this,” she said, “and don’t cry any more. Can’t you get
off to-night and have a good rest?”

The girl shook her head vigorously, smiling at Eleanor through her
tears. “I’d lose my job like that, ma’am. I ain’t any worse off than
the others; only it did make me sick to lose the money when I got so
many depending on me--my old grandmother and two kid brothers--and I
wanted to make a little Christmas for the kids. Thank you an awful lot,
ma’am.”

The girls went on their way fairly bursting with indignation.

“The idea of fining her for sitting down to rest!” sputtered Madeline.
“And for being late, when she’s worked half the night before, it’s
outrageous!”

Eleanor had quite forgotten the odors and the risk of infection. “Let’s
buy some ribbon,” she suggested. “That counter seems to be the hub of
the shopping fray.”

So they bought ribbon of a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty who proved
to be Pietro’s sister. She beamed on Eleanor, and in the safe foreign
tongue confided to Madeline that Cannon’s was certainly a bad place
to work. She could look out for herself, she explained, flashing an
imperious glance at an inspector. She brought in lots of Italian trade,
and could interpret both in Italian and French for the women who hadn’t
learned English. So they treated her better. Oh, they fined her, of
course--that was the rule--and she worked most nights. But she was
pretty sure of keeping her place, whatever happened. That was a big
help. They should see the dirty hole of a lunch-room before they left,
she called gleefully after them, under the very eye of the fat little
man whom she had pointed out as Mr. Cannon. It was certainly “a big
help” to be able to utter wholesome truths like that with impunity.

“Let’s go and reason with him,” suggested Madeline, looking angrily
after the fat little proprietor. “Let’s make him take us to see the
dirty hole of a rest-room. Let’s threaten to boycott him if he doesn’t
reform his ways.”

Eleanor looked very much frightened. “We should only get the girls
we’ve talked to into trouble. The boycott wouldn’t work because we’ve
never bought anything anyway until to-day. I--I think I’m beginning to
feel faint, Madeline. Let’s go home and talk it over with Betty and Mr.
Thayer. They’ll think of just the right thing to do.”

But Mr. Thayer had gone to Boston, via Babbie Hildreth’s, and it was
Eugenia Ford’s plan that, after much discussion, was settled upon, for
the reason, as Madeline put it, that it was “just wild enough to work.”

So after chapel the next morning Eugenia, Georgia, and Fluffy--Straight
had tearfully decided not to cut Logic--chaperoned by Betty, appeared
at Cannon’s and asked to see the head of the firm.

“Good-morning, Mr. Cannon,” said Georgia in businesslike tones, when
he appeared. “We’ve got a proposition to make to you. We three are
Harding girls, and this is Miss Wales, secretary of the Student’s Aid
Society,--also proprietor of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop.”

“Indeed! Charmed to meet you, I’m sure.” The fat little man bowed low
and smiled a fatuous, oily smile. “Anything I can do in the way of
canned goods, crackers, sweets--to the sweet, ladies.” He bowed and
smiled again.

“We want to ask a favor,” pursued Georgia, utterly ignoring his
courtesies. “We all have pretty good times generally, and very merry
Christmases. We want other girls to have the same. We have just lately
realized how hard it is for salespeople just at this time of year--how
Christmas means to them just terribly hard work for little or no extra
pay--and we want to help at least a few of them. So we’ve gotten up a
petition about shopping early in the day, and early in the season, for
the Harding girls to sign. Now we also want to arrange to come down and
help some of your girls out. We want to take the places of three of
them every day from twelve to one, so that they can get a good rest at
noon, and also from five to six, so they can, if possible, do any extra
work they have then and so avoid night work. If not, they can at least
start fresh for the evening.”

Mr. Cannon stared at Georgia in utter amazement. Suddenly his fat face
grew red, and he shouted angrily, “Who’s been talkin’ to you? You know
an awful lot about my business, don’t you, now? You’d better clear out.”

“Without the canned goods and crackers and sweets--for the sweet?”
asked Fluffy gaily, looking down at him with her fascinating, insolent
smile.

“We’ve talked to no one, Mr. Cannon,” put in little Eugenia earnestly.

“And we mean to help you too, as is only fair, if you are good enough
to give us the chance to help the girls,” added Betty, with quiet
dignity.

Mr. Cannon glowered at the circle of pretty, serious, half-frightened
faces.

“You don’t know nothing about clerking,” he sputtered at last. “Nice
mess you’d make of your hours! Nice kind of help you’d hand out to me!”

“I was a waitress once,” Fluffy informed him calmly, winking at Betty.
“The young woman I worked for said I was very good at it. Besides, all
my little friends came and patronized me. If you’ll let me try, I’ll
ask them to patronize me here.”

“We don’t expect pay,” Georgia explained, “and the first day we come
we’d just be extras, watching to see what our duties would be.”

“Don’t be silly, Mr. Cannon,” urged Fluffy, who was never in the
least daunted by opposition. “We’ll accomplish more in an hour than
these poor dragged-out girls ever do--even if we don’t understand the
difficult art of clerking,” she added maliciously. “And they’ll do more
in their afternoons, after they’ve had a chance to rest. What you want
is your money’s worth, isn’t it? The best service for the smallest
wages. Don’t----”

“See here,” Mr. Cannon cut her short, “let’s have a little talk. What
did you come here for to-day?” He pointed a pudgy finger at Fluffy, who
explained once more, in picturesque phrases, the idea they had had in
coming to interview him.

“You say you’ve been a waitress?”

Fluffy nodded, winking solemnly again at Betty.

“You’re not a labor organizer?”

With equal solemnity she denied the charge.

“Far as I can see, you’re more or less luny. If you want to, you can
try. Come to-day at twelve. If you get along, maybe the others can
take hold. Some o’ my girls are fagged, for sure, and if your little
friends, as you call them, come in, that’ll help some. I’ve always
said,” added Mr. Cannon proudly, “that if I could once get the college
trade to swing my way, I could keep it. Honest values for cash is my
motto.” And with a curt little nod he started off.

“Wait!” Fluffy arrested his progress. “You mean I’m to come and not the
others?”

Mr. Cannon nodded. “As the most likely specimen. I don’t believe in
beginning any new experiment on too sumptoos a scale.” This time he was
irrevocably gone.

Fluffy wore a comical air of dismay. “Gracious! Doing it all alone
isn’t at all my idea of a stunt. I shall be terribly scared and lonely.
Straight’s got to spend the entire hour buying things of me. Oh, dear!
She can’t, because it’s a cash store and we haven’t any money left. I
wonder, if I should tell him I had a twin, whether he wouldn’t let her
try to-day too.”

“No time,” said Georgia firmly. “Psych. 6 beckons. But you shan’t be
deserted. We’ll take up a contribution for Straight to spend.”

Fluffy’s experiment in social service was the sensation of the Harding
morning. Promptly at twelve she appeared, and was given the place of
a wan little girl behind the ribbon counter. Ten minutes later--she
had stipulated for that interval in which to learn how to “work” her
cash-book--the “college trade” appeared in the persons of a lively
delegation conducted by the triumphant Straight, all eagerness to
display her adored twin in this new and exciting rôle. They bought
ribbons recklessly, with much delicious professional encouragement
from Fluffy. They smiled cheerfully upon Mr. Cannon, who lurked in
the offing, watching the progress of his “new experiment” with amazed
interest. Piloted by Eleanor Watson, they ascended to the doll counter,
and provided themselves with souvenirs of the occasion in the shape of
dancing dolls which twirled fascinatingly about a central magnet on top
of a little tin box. There had been nothing so nice at the regular
toy store, they declared loudly, for Mr. Cannon’s benefit. At one they
escorted the weary Fluffy triumphantly to the Tally-ho for luncheon.

“He tried to hire me for all the afternoons,” explained Fluffy proudly,
“and he says the rest of you may come, and Straight too, seeing she’s
my twin; but no more. He doesn’t believe in trying noo experiments on
too sumptoos a scale,” mimicked Fluffy joyously.

A good many things besides the easing of the lots of a few tired
sales-girls came of the “noo experiment.” One was a queer friendship
that sprang up between Fluffy and Mr. Cannon, cemented by a compact,
on Fluffy’s part, hereafter to “trade for cash,” which Mr. Cannon
considered the only honest way of living, and, on Mr. Cannon’s, to
accept Mr. Thayer’s offer of rooms in the club-house where classes in
embroidery and music and some amusement clubs might be enjoyed by Mr.
Cannon’s girls. Then Madeline’s “Sunday Special” article on the Harding
girls’ practical way of helping those less fortunate was copied and
discussed through the whole country; and many women and men who had
never given the matter a thought before realized that shop-girls are
human and began treating them as if they were.

Meanwhile Betty Wales, seeing another application of the same
principle, got together the committee on the Proper Excitement of the
Idle Rich and made them a proposition.

“A store in New York wants two thousand ploshkin candle-shades before
Christmas. They won’t handle less than a thousand. Six Morton Hall
girls are working their heads off to get them ready in time--that means
that the last shipment must go by the fifteenth. Why can’t you help
them out by having some candle-shade bees?”

“I haven’t had a chance to do one thing for Christmas myself,” objected
Georgia sadly.

“Do you usually make all your presents?” demanded Mary Brooks
incisively. “You know you never touch one of them. As the presiding
genius of the gift-shop department and the one and only Perfect Patron
of the Tally-ho I am bound to help this Excitement along. It’s simply
absurd for you to rush down to Cannon’s every day, and then refuse to
help the girls in this very college who are just as tired and just as
much tied down by this horrible Christmas tradition of buying things
all in a heap, regardless of the people who have to make them then, or
starve. The first bee can be at my house,” ended Mary sweetly, “and
there will be perfectly good refreshments.”

The bees accomplished wonders, but it was still a struggle to finish
the candle-shades in time; and when the Thorn cut her hand and the
wound got poisoned and wouldn’t heal, things seemed nearly hopeless.
But little Eugenia Ford came nobly to the rescue. “There’s no rule
against getting up at three in the morning,” she said, and for six
consecutive days she woke herself heroically at that hour, and cut,
pasted, and put together candle-shades until dawn, hardly taking time
for breakfast, but never neglecting her college work--she had learned
her lesson about that.

At three o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, the sixteenth, Eugenia
hung out a busy sign and curled up on her couch for a much needed nap.
When she woke again, it was almost dark. She had promised to go to
Vespers with Helena Mason.

“I’m afraid I’m late, but she might have called for me,” reflected
Eugenia, getting rapidly into a trailing blue broadcloth dress, which,
with a big plumed hat, silver-fox furs, and a huge bunch of violets,
was calculated to make a very favorable impression upon the Vespers
audience.

When she was ready, Eugenia consulted a diminutive watch. “Quarter to
seven!” Her expression of consternation gave way suddenly to relief. “I
remember now that it was two hours fast. No--I changed it. Well, it’s
surely all wrong.” Eugenia dashed down the hall to Helena Mason’s room.
Her hurried knock was answered by a rather grudging “Come in.”

“I’m very sorry to be late,” Eugenia began apologetically.

Miss Mason sat at her desk, writing busily. She turned her head at
last, and stared hard at Eugenia.

“I should say you were early myself,” she observed, “but why the plumes
and the train?”

Eugenia seized a tiny alarm clock that stood on the floor by the bed,
which, for some strange reason, was not made up--at Vespers time on
Sunday.

“It is quarter to seven,” she cried aghast. “Why didn’t you call me,
and why isn’t it dark, and what do you mean by saying I’m early for
Vespers?”

“Eugenia Ford, are you crazy?” inquired Miss Mason sternly.

Poor Eugenia looked ready to cry. “I don’t think I am. Tell me what I’m
early for, please.”

“Breakfast, of course,” explained Miss Mason. “I got up at six to copy
this theme. It’s now almost seven--there’s the rising bell this minute.
As for Vespers, now you speak of it I do remember that you promised to
call for me, but I went to the Westcott for dinner yesterday and to
Vespers right from there, without ever thinking of our engagement.”

Eugenia sank down limply on the disheveled bed. “Then I’ve slept since
three o’clock yesterday,” she announced tragically, “in my kimono, on
top of my couch, you know. I never heard of such a thing, did you?”

The Thorn certainly never had, and she was much impressed.

“I always supposed that rich girls like Miss Ford just thought of
clothes and dances and traveling and a good time generally,” she
confided to Betty. “I never thought one of them would wear herself out
helping poor little me. You’ve got to be pretty tired to sleep like
that. I shall always feel differently about rich girls after this.”

And she kept her word. The Thorn’s sharp point was dulled. Instead of
being a faultfinder and an agitator she threw her influence, which
for some obscure reason was considerable, on the side of harmony and
good-fellowship.

“I’ve told the third floor to stop spying on Esther Bond,” she informed
Betty. “I’m convinced myself that she studies out loud, and for some
queer reason doesn’t want it known. She’s awfully secretive. That
Helena Mason goes up to see her quite a lot. You’d think she’d be proud
of knowing a prominent girl like Miss Mason, but she smuggles her in
and out as if she was a poor relation. All the same, I guess the way
she acts is her own affair. She hasn’t said much, but she must know
she’s being watched, and I’ve advised them all to stop it. She looks
as if she had troubles enough without that. I’ve been reading up about
ghosts, and they do seem to be pretty much made up, specially all those
seen by several people at one time. Did Miss Dick’s school ever find
out about theirs?”

Betty shook her head. “The poor little girl who got the most frightened
by it has been terribly ill. They thought last week that she was going
to die, but she’s much better now.”

“Some other girl must be feeling pretty bad, if it was done for a
joke,” said the Thorn.

“Yes,” agreed Betty, “but Miss Dick thinks it was an accident--and
little Shirley’s strong imagination, of course. I hope she’s right. And
thank you for taking Miss Bond’s part. We don’t want our silly ghosts
to hurt any one’s feelings or make any girl sorry she came to Morton
Hall.”




CHAPTER XII

RAFAEL PROPOSES


MADELINE worked on her play with the furious industry of the “digs” she
had always ridiculed. The floor of her room was littered with dusty
sheets of manuscript, which she mysteriously informed her landlady
must not be touched, or “the world and all would be lost.” She took
long, solitary walks, sat for hours at her desk or the Tally-ho’s,
alternately staring hopelessly into space, or frantically covering
reams of papers with her pretty illegible writing. Occasionally she
emerged from her closely-guarded solitude and gave a tea-drinking for
the B. C. A.’s, at which she adroitly turned the conversation to the
strangest topics; or she bundled some long-suffering friend off with
her on an endless shopping tour or trolley ride, during which she
listened in complete absorption to chance bits of dialogue, coming home
with a delicious new monologue for which she insisted on an immediate
audience, “to test the note of reality,” she explained vaguely.

One day just before Christmas she was caught by Mary Brooks in a mellow
mood and dragged off to dinner, to give Dr. Hinsdale a practical
demonstration of some of the idiosyncrasies of genius. And after Dr.
Hinsdale had gone to his study, over the second round of coffee by the
open fire, she explained her newest literary device to the bewildered
Mary.

“When I do stunty pageants for my friends to act and footless little
playlets that don’t matter,” she began, “I just dash them off without
thinking and they turn out beautifully. But somehow the idea of writing
seriously for publication stiffens me all up inside and muddles my
ideas. Heroine always turns into a freak or a prig on my hands. Hero
gets hysterical when I try to make him earnest. But now when things
begin to go wrong, I calmly tear up what I’ve written, and go out and
make my little pals talk off the next scene to me, or at least recall
to my mind how real conversation sounds. The awfully romantic, lover-y
parts I either have to overhear or extract from people who don’t know
me. The girl at Cannon’s who is the model for my heartless coquette
little guesses her proud mission in life.”

“I should call that just cold-blooded cribbing,” declared Mary
indignantly.

“Cold-blooded cribbing from life is the very top notch of art,”
Madeline assured her. “My play is a slice from life. I suppose it’s
because I’m young and inexperienced that I have to keep stopping to
refer to life so often as I go along.”

“Am I in it anywhere?” demanded Mary eagerly.

“You and the girl at Cannon’s and Fluffy Dutton and Betty are the
principal ingredients in the heroine,” explained Madeline. “But I defy
you to have discovered it for yourself, and I swear you to eternal
secrecy, because people would misunderstand. Life with a big ‘L’ is the
kind I’m cribbing; I should scorn, of course, to put my friends and
their petty affairs into a play.”

Mary drew her smooth brows into a puzzled frown. “I suppose I shall
understand all that when I see the play,” she said with a sigh.
“George Garrison Hinsdale would better be saving up for a trip to New
York before long, including a box party to the first night of your
slice from life.”

“You’ll have to wait till the second night if you want a box,” Madeline
told her calmly. “All the boxes are spoken for on the first night, and
there will be several parties in the seats, besides.”

This calm assumption of success made Mary gasp and engage her husband,
later in the evening, in an intricate discussion of the distinction
between the serene self-assurance of genius and the ordinary man’s
unjustified conceit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Eleanor Watson wanted to join Jim in New York. He was sure of being
there for several months, he wrote her, and equally sure of being sent
off to “some miserable hole” in the early spring.

“Beating the firm’s time-limit on Morton Hall,” he wrote, “is about the
unluckiest thing I ever did. They’ve written me down for a hustler, and
slated me for all the forlorn hopes. Remind Betty that she owes me a
good long letter for that.”

The thing that kept Eleanor at Harding was of course the devotion of
the Terrible Ten to her and to education under her auspices. In vain
she had introduced other story-tellers; the evenings that she stayed
away to give Mr. Thayer’s most promising candidates a trial were
tumultuous revolts, or, after she had patiently explained to the class
how unhappy their disorderly conduct made her, spiritless sessions,
endured because the smouldering fire in Rafael’s eyes commanded outward
submission from the Ten.

“But if you really leave I’m afraid they’ll all backslide again,” said
Mr. Thayer, “and you see they’re on probation now to the very end of
their course. Did Rafael tell you that he’d had another raise? That
boy does the work of two men, in spite of his bad hand--runs the most
difficult machine in the factory, and makes repairs that we used to
have to get a man up from Boston to attend to.”

“How old is he?” asked Eleanor idly.

“Eighteen, he thinks. They’re all older than they look or act.”

Eleanor sighed. “They won’t be able to meet the reading requirements
of the factory law for six weeks yet, and they ought to be induced to
keep on all winter--certainly the ones who are bright enough at their
work to have any future before them. But it does seem absurd for me to
stay on here just because ten young Italians listen to my stories and
eat my peanuts.”

“And appreciate the tact and understanding that you bestow so
generously, mixed with the peanuts and the stories,” added Mr. Thayer
soberly.

That night Eleanor went to Mr. Thayer’s office after the class to have
one more consultation with him about its future. When she came back for
her coat and hat a stealthy figure slipped past her in the hall.

“Did you forget something, Rafael?” she asked, recognizing her favorite
pupil.

Rafael muttered something unintelligible and hurried off, but his
return was explained when Eleanor found a neatly folded note tucked in
the sleeve of her coat.

  “Der Mis”--it began, “I luv yu. i haf nuther raz. I keep you good lik
  lada. Wil yu haf me to mary, if not I die

                                                  “Yur RAFAEL.

  “I tak 1 hor a day for wik to make thiz note rite.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Eleanor read the pathetic little missive through with growing dismay.
He had misunderstood her kindness--the pictures she had given him to
brighten the dark little hovel where he and his family lived, the
Thanksgiving dinner she had sent them, the special smile she always had
ready when he appeared at the club. She started to show her note to Mr.
Thayer, then changed her mind.

After all, Rafael was in earnest, and she would treat his proposal like
any other. It should be a secret between them. She would think out for
herself some kindly way of explaining that she could not “haf” him “to
mary,” and that he must not die of a broken heart.

The next evening when the class met she smiled at him just as usual,
and catching his eye early in the evening slipped a note, folded as his
had been, under his cap.

In it she had printed, in short easy words that Rafael could read, how
sorry she was to disappoint him, how she liked him for a friend, how
he must forget what he had written and work hard to make the Italian
girl whom he would love some day proud and happy and comfortable.

“I can’t treat it as absurd,” she had decided, “and I can’t be cross to
him. He means it all, and he doesn’t dream how comical it is. I only
hope he won’t be too excited to read what I’ve written.”

Evidently he was not, for just as Eleanor, having said good-night
to the Harding girls who had walked up the hill with her from their
classes, was turning in at her own door, Rafael glided out from the
shadow of the house and stood in her path.

“Der is no hope?” he demanded tragically, standing bareheaded before
her.

“Oh, Rafael,” Eleanor remonstrated, “I always speak the truth to you,
don’t I? I wrote you a note because you wrote me one; and now you
ask me if I mean it. Why, dear boy, I’m almost old enough to be your
mother.”

“I love you,” Rafael told her stoutly.

“Then please me by acting sensible. You’re much too young to think
about marrying and I----”

“You luf anodder,” broke in Rafael accusingly.

Eleanor flushed pink under cover of the darkness. Hardly to herself
even did she admit the part that Richard Blake played in her thoughts.
Indeed so skilfully had she concealed it that Dick Blake, working day
and night to push “The Quiver” to the top of the magazine world, was
wont to smile scornfully to himself when he thought how little he and
his valiant efforts meant to the girl who, in all his hopes and plans
and dreams, was to share his future.

But in a swift moment’s consideration Eleanor decided that the best
way to cure this sentimental little Italian boy of his infatuation was
to let him know that he had indeed a successful rival. Telling Rafael
was different from admitting it to anyone else--because Rafael was
foolishly in love too.

She stretched out her hand impulsively and patted his shoulder. “Yes,
Rafael,” she whispered softly, “I’m in love with somebody else. But he
doesn’t know it yet, and I’m not sure that he cares for me. Nobody
knows it but you, and I’m telling you because I----”

“Good-bye, lovely lada, good-bye.” Rafael caught the hand that lay on
his shoulder, kissed it in his passionate, foreign fashion, and glided
away into the darkness.

Eleanor stood looking after him with the curious sensation of being
the heroine of a pretty old-time romance that belonged in a fairy
world of magic and moonlight, and ought to be set to the tinkling
music of guitars. And just as she had put out her light and gone
to bed, still smiling at the whimsicality of the whole affair, and
particularly of her having confided to Rafael her carefully-secreted
feeling for Dick--who would do beautifully for the brave young prince
of the fairy-tale the music came. The Terrible Ten were grouped under
the window singing soft, crooning Italian songs to their Lovely Lada.
Giuseppi had traveled with his father one summer in a troupe of street
musicians; it was his fingers that picked a bit uncertainly at the
guitar’s strings, and little Nicolo’s wonderful voice, rising sweet and
true above the others, that led the chorus. But Rafael stood in the
centre of the half circle, his angelic face touched with light from
a down-stairs window, and the sob and the thrill in the music, that
brought a lump to Eleanor’s throat and a mist over her eyes, was all in
Rafael’s voice, singing out his love and longing to the cruel lady who
would not “haf” him “to mary.”

Eleanor had a bunch of red roses on her table that the adoring Eugenia
Ford had sent her, and she tossed them down to the singers, who laughed
and cheered in most unromantic boy fashion, and finally departed,
leaving Eleanor to wonder how Rafael had explained the serenade to his
followers, and how he would treat her at the next club meeting. She
little guessed what would happen before then.

For the next morning before she was dressed an apologetic parlor-maid
escorted a weeping Italian girl to Eleanor’s door. It was Pietro’s
flashing-eyed sister, her beauty tear-stained and her proud confidence
quite vanished.

“Rafael’s hurt,” she sobbed. “Black Hand maybe, we think. He don’t know
nothing, but he moan your name with his eyes shut. Would you come?”

Of course she would come. She hurried the maid off after the best
doctor in Harding, and she and the beautiful Maria went at once to
Rafael, who lay tossing in delirium on his blood-stained bed, a
terrible gash across his throat, which had been roughly bandaged by an
old Italian herb doctor. Nobody, it seemed, guessed what had really
happened, though when some one found a tiny dagger under the bed Pietro
and Nicolo interchanged curious glances. They had recognized it as the
one with which Rafael had struck terror to the hearts of the Ten and
compelled their rigid obedience.

Eleanor installed a trained nurse, made the doctor promise to give the
case his best attention, and went off to find her unfailing stand-by in
troublous times, Betty Wales. For Rafael was beyond knowing anybody,
perhaps for all time, and she felt like a criminal when his mother
kissed her sleeve in gratitude for all she had done and Maria clung to
her, sobbing out her love for Rafael who never had “eyes for any girl”
and declaring that if he died she would enter a convent. She couldn’t
bring herself to tell them the dreadful truth.

But, “If he dies I shall be a murderer,” she told Betty bitterly.
“I’ve always been so vain and frivolous. Now when I want to take life
seriously and do things for other people, as you do, I only make a mess
of it, and bring dreadful trouble where I wanted most to help. I shall
never, never try to do anything more. I wish I were----”

“No, you don’t,” Betty assured her hastily. “Just because you did the
best you could for those boys and this silly one had his head full of
sentimental nonsense doesn’t make you responsible. It’s a dreadful
thing, of course, but I’m sure he’ll get well. Didn’t the doctor think
so?”

The doctor hadn’t said.

“Then I’ll leave word for him to telephone you here of any change
either way,” Betty decreed. “Mrs. Post is going to make German
Christmas cakes this morning for the girls. She wanted me to help
her, but I’ve got to go to the Tally-ho before chapel and then to the
office, so you simply must help instead. I suppose you haven’t had any
breakfast, have you now?”

Eleanor didn’t want any.

“Of course you do. I’ll send some up by a maid, and Mrs. Post will tell
you when she’s ready to begin on the cakes. Remember, the telephone
messages will come here, so you must stay till I get back.”

Six times that morning Betty left an accommodating friend in charge
of her office, and in the short intervals between clients rushed over
to inquire for the cakes, Eleanor, and Rafael. At noon she snatched a
moment before luncheon to tell Mr. Thayer all about it--Eleanor had
declared she never could do that--so that he could explain what was
necessary to the authorities and avoid a futile search for non-existent
Black Hand plots and family feuds. Mr. Thayer had seen Rafael and the
doctor, and the doctor had been very encouraging. Betty flew back to
assure Eleanor that he had not been deceiving her--that he had said
the very same things to Mr. Thayer--and to beg her assistance that
afternoon at the Tally-ho workshop. For Madeline had come out of her
dramatic eclipse long enough to design some Christmas dinner-cards,
and there was a small fortune in them if only they could be put on sale
in time. Secretly Eleanor thought that Betty had grown just a little
bit selfish and very commercial since they had left college; but she
could not well refuse, after the dainty breakfast on a tray and all the
calls and the arranging with Mr. Thayer, to help with the Christmas
dinner-cards.

Next day Rafael was worse. The doctor looked serious and suggested a
night-nurse and a consultation. At noon Eleanor declared that the air
of the little workshop stifled her, and Betty gave up office-hours--an
unheard-of proceeding--to go for a long tramp, during which she planned
all sorts of delightful things that Eleanor should do for Rafael when
he got well.

The next day the boy was better, the day after that worse. But at the
end of a nerve-racking week of alternating hopes and fears the doctor
pronounced him out of danger. That very afternoon Jim telegraphed
that he was sick with a cold and needed Eleanor. Jim had always
hated coddling, Eleanor commented wonderingly, and failed to notice
Betty’s dimple flashing out in a tiny smile that was at once sternly
suppressed. For Jim had written her that he only hoped he could
preserve “the faded shadow of a suspicion of a snuffle” until Eleanor’s
arrival. “After that,” he concluded, “I count on my new bull pup,
suitors galore, and the diversions of little old New York to blow away
any remaining relics of melancholy. When the poor little chap is well
enough dad and I will see him through the best trade-school we can find
and give him every chance that’s coming to him. Adoring some girls is a
thing no fellow can or ought to help.”




CHAPTER XIII

GENIUS ARRIVES


BETTY WALES was going home for Christmas--a “ploshkin” income puts life
on such a comfortable financial basis! And between Christmas and New
Year’s Babe was going to be married. That meant coming half-way back
to Harding for the wedding; and it made easier Betty’s sad decision
that since the stocking factory was willing to postpone its Christmas
party till New Year’s, and since most of the Morton Hall girls would
spend their vacations in town, and certainly be very forlorn indeed
unless somebody looked after them, it was the duty of Miss B. Wales,
Secretary, to come back early and lend a hand.

Betty breathed a deep sigh of relief when she had seen Eleanor off to
New York, in the company of Madeline Ayres, who had finished her play
and now flatly refused to delay the putting on of the final touches in
New York for the interests of the Tally-ho’s gift-shop department.

“Why, my dear girls,” she declared tragically, “I’m not half through
yet. I’ve got to see every success on Broadway now, to get into touch
with the season’s fads. Then I shall ‘supe’ a few times, to catch the
right feeling for one or two bare spots in my first act. Finally, I
shall probably hate my play so that I’ll tear it up and take the next
boat for Naples, to be consoled by my Bohemian family, who will laud me
to the skies for tearing up a play because I considered it bad art.”

“Oh, Madeline!” came in horror-struck chorus at this point.

“Well,” Madeline admitted blandly, “I’m willing to confide to friends
that at present my humble effort looks to me like the play of the
year--and I’m fairly stage-wise already. Dick Blake used to advise all
the aspiring dramatic critics he knew to take me along to their big
first nights, because I can always tell by instinct what the audience
is saying to itself. I’m a perfect mirror of public opinion. If I
still believe in my play after I’ve been ’round a little I shall see
Miss Dwight and her manager. After that----” Madeline shrugged her
shoulders, and confided irrelevantly to the resident B. C. A.’s, who
had come down to see the travelers off, that she wanted a black velvet
hat with a white feather.

“And I’m going to have it, what’s more,” she ended. “I wrote dad, and
he just said, ‘It’s lucky you don’t want two white feathers, now isn’t
it?’ And he sent along a munificent check.”

Which proved, Betty said, that genius is not incompatible with
frivolous-mindedness.

Jim sniffled manfully on their arrival, and his carefully marshaled
“features” diverted Eleanor beautifully, especially after she had
been up to Harding once to see Rafael, who, after he began to mend,
progressed with amazing rapidity on the road to recovery. Because she
had dreaded seeing him, she was relieved to get the meeting over, and
much more relieved to find the boy so completely changed. As soon
as it could be managed he had been moved to a hospital, and the new
atmosphere, supplemented by good care and kindness, had done wonders
for him. Before he was well enough to leave, Mr. Thayer declared,
Rafael would be completely Americanized.

He greeted Eleanor with a frank smile above his big bandages.

“I awful silly boy,” he said, holding out a thin hand to her. “I guess
you want laugh at me. I guess you tink I know not how gran’ you live
in this country. Now I know. I know two, tree nurse-lady and many
visitor-lady, looka like you. I like to live here always. I hope I get
well awful slow.”

But, when Eleanor had delivered Jim’s message about Rafael’s going, as
soon as he was strong enough, to a fine trade-school in Philadelphia,
he changed his mind.

“Den I hope I get well awful fast. Before I get old, I know how all de
wheels in dis world go round, mebbe. I think you be mad at me, and now
you do me dis great big splendor.”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t ever ‘mad’ at you,” Eleanor explained, “only sorry
you were so silly, and dreadfully frightened when you were so ill the
first week.”

Rafael shrugged his shoulders. “Good ting for me. I come here. I learn
how to be ’Merican man in two, tree weeks. I come here silly lil
foreign boy. I look roun’. I listen hard. I see how you do here in
your gran’ country. And now,” Rafael snuggled into his pillows with
a beatific smile, “I find why all dose wheel go roun’. I maka fine
machine, mebbe. I swear off carry a dagger. And I tank you alla my
life.”

So Eleanor could return to Jim, the bull pup, the suitors, and the
diversions of New York, with the happy assurance that in the end
Rafael’s devotion to her might be the making of him, and at the least
its untoward climax would do him more good than harm. Having nothing
now to worry about, she devoted the journey back to New York to
planning a ravishing new gown for Babe’s wedding. It was to be yellow,
because Dick Blake (who would not be at the wedding) liked yellow gowns
on her best; and very plain, because Dick liked simple lines and no
furbelows. Details might safely be left to Madame Celeste. It would
perhaps be more accurate to say that Eleanor devoted the journey back
to New York to thinking about Dick Blake.

Babe’s wedding was to be a grand society function.

“To please John’s father and my mother,” Babe wrote to her friends
of 19--; “John and I are resigned, because a wedding only lasts for
one evening, and after that we can shut ourselves up in our regular
castle of a house, with only the people we want, and everything you can
think of in your wildest dreams to amuse ourselves with. So one little
evening isn’t much to sacrifice. Mother says we owe it to our social
position. She doesn’t know that we have decided not to have any social
position. We’re just going to have a good time and try to make some
good times for other people. An impromptu wedding would have been lots
more fun, but you must all come, just the same.”

Babe’s sister was to be maid of honor, Bob and Babbie, Betty and
Roberta Lewis were to be bridesmaids, and the other “Merry Hearts”
would sit together in a front pew, and be considered just as much in
the wedding party as if they were bridesmaids also. Jasper J. Morton
was coming up the night of the wedding in his private car. He had
meant to come the day before “to help you entertain Miss B. A. and her
friends,” he wrote Babe, but there were important directors’ meetings
to keep him at the last minute. He wrote Babe not to worry about him.
“I shall charter a special train if necessary--and don’t I always
arrive on time as a matter of principle?”

But when Babe left the house for the church he had not appeared, and
after they had kept people waiting and wondering half an hour, and Babe
was so nervous that she declared she should cry in one more minute it
was decided to go on without him.

The reception was half over when he appeared, looking very meek and
sheepish. He kissed Babe on both cheeks, shook John’s hand till it
ached, and despatched Babbie to “find those reporter fellows and tell
’em I’m not smashed up anywhere between here and New York, and I don’t
withhold my blessing from the happy couple. Tell ’em I was accidentally
detained, and if they want to know how say it was on a private matter
that is none of their business.”

“And add some characteristic remarks about the ridiculous apes who try
to run our railroads,” put in John with a chuckle.

“No, sir,” said Jasper J. Morton, with emphasis, “not this trip. Pretty
nearly every mile was a record, and I’ve recommended that engineer to
run the road’s Lightning Limited at a big increase over his present
pay. The reason I didn’t get here was personal--purely personal.”

Later in the evening he got Babe and John and Betty into a corner, and
told them all about it. “Miss B. A.’s to blame, as usual,” he began.
“You see my train went out just ten minutes behind the Lightning
Limited, with no stop till Albany and the track clear all the way west.
I was hurrying through the station to get on, when I nearly ran down a
pretty little woman who was crying so hard she didn’t see me coming.
She’d lost the Lightning Limited, and her husband was dying in a little
place just beyond Albany where he’d gone on business and been taken
suddenly sick. There was a slow train in an hour, but that would be too
late, she said.

“Naturally I told her to come with me to Albany. And then of course I
couldn’t leave her there to hunt up her connection alone, and have to
waste time waiting, maybe. So I arranged for a stop at the town she
was going to, and then,” Jasper J. Morton flushed shamefacedly, “when
nobody met her, we side-tracked our outfit and I drove up to the hotel
with her. She was barely in time, the doctor said. They’d been married
just a year to-day, she told me. I guess if ever you two are in a tight
place you’ll be thankful to anybody who misses his boy’s wedding to
help you out. But I wouldn’t have those reporters out there know what
a soft-hearted old auntie I’m getting to be, not for anything. Miss B.
A., you’ll be the ruin of me yet, with all your theories about looking
out for the other fellow.”

“We’ll be married all over again if you’d like us to, Father Morton,”
Babe offered gallantly, although she had assured John after the
ceremony that she wouldn’t ever have promised to marry him if she bad
realized the queer feelings you have while you are doing it.

But Mr. Morton refused her generous offer. “I’m satisfied,” he said,
“as long as John’s got you for a wife and I’ve got you for a daughter.
My seeing it done wouldn’t have made any big difference to you----”

“Oh, yes, it would,” broke in Babe kindly.

“Not the difference it made to that poor little crying lady to see
her husband,” pursued Mr. Morton. Then he chuckled merrily as Babbie
appeared, looking very angry and quite absurdly pretty in consequence.
“Were those reporters inquisitive?” he demanded.

“They did think you stayed away on purpose,” declared Babbie
indignantly. “As if any one could possibly disapprove of Babe! I
told them you were just as fond of her as John is. And now they’re
discussing what effect your being late will have on Wall Street. They
said to tell you that, and to ask you please to come out and talk
to them, if you didn’t want the market to collapse to-morrow like a
pricked balloon. They laughed right in my face when I said it was a
‘private affair’ that kept you.”

“I’ll settle them,” said Jasper J. Morton, and went off muttering
something about “those chimpanzees that run the newspapers.”

Whereat John looked relieved. “First time he’s acted natural
to-night,” he said. “If he hadn’t gone up in the air pretty soon, I
should have telegraphed his doctor. But now we can start on our wedding
trip feeling perfectly safe about him.”

Madeline couldn’t come to the wedding. She had sent her play to Miss
Dwight’s manager, and now she was exerting all her ingenuity to get a
personal interview with Miss Dwight herself.

“Her present play isn’t going well, and she’s as cross as a bear,”
Madeline wrote Babe. “Dick Blake knows her--had dinner with her just
before I came down. She said that night that she believed in her play,
and if it failed she should lose all faith in American audiences, buy a
lake in Maine and a river in Florida, and retire from the stage. Dick
says she will never do that, but he thinks it’s no use talking my play
to her in her present mood. He got the manager of the Lyric Repertoire
Theatre to say he’d read the manuscript, and now he’s perfectly furious
with me because I persist with Miss Dwight. ‘Agatha or nobody’ is my
war-cry! If she’d only read my play or talk to me, one or the other,
I know there wouldn’t be any more trouble. That play fits her like a
glove, and it will take--oh, how it will take!”

When college opened again Madeline was still on Miss Dwight’s trail,
but almost ready to give up and let the Lyric manager, or anybody
else who wanted it, take her play. Miss Dwight’s manager had made no
sign. Miss Dwight herself, piqued by her first failure, had entrenched
herself behind unassailable barriers.

“I’ve tried everything,” wrote Madeline despairingly. “I got ‘The
Sentinel’ to send me to interview her, and she wouldn’t let me in. The
Enderbys gave a dinner for her; she accepted and then sent word she
was ill. Dick Blake relented and tried to introduce the subject of his
talented young friend, and she would hear none of me.

“To-night I’m playing my last card. If it doesn’t take the trick, why,
I’ve lost, that’s all. Rumor says that her manager has had six hundred
plays sent him this last week--of course he won’t find mine under that
pile.”

[Illustration: JUST AS THEY HAD GIVEN HER UP]

For two weeks thereafter the pen of the aspiring playwright was silent.
Betty and Mary Brooks decided that she was busy getting her play out
from under the pile of other manuscripts, in order to send it to the
despised manager of the Lyric. So they were surprised and delighted
when Betty received a rapturous, incoherent scrawl, announcing complete
success.

  “She took it. She’s rehearsing it now. The part does fit her, just as
  I said it would. She’s coming up with me soon to see Harding.

  “With love from the happiest girl in New York,

                                                  MAD.

  “P. S.--Plan a B. C. A. tea-party for to-morrow. I can’t wait any
  longer to tell you all about it.”

The B. C. A.’s assembled joyously, and just as they had given her up
Madeline appeared, trying hard to act offhand and unconcerned, and
managing it about as badly as might have been expected of a young
person whose first play was being rehearsed with much enthusiasm by
Agatha Dwight, and advertised far and wide by her manager as the play
of the year.

The B. C. A.’s plied her with tea, muffins, and jam, which she
despatched promptly, and with questions, which she totally ignored,
giving them all sorts of irrelevant information about Eleanor’s
music, Jim’s dog, and Dick’s splendid serial, by a “dark horse” in
fiction-writing, which was doing wonders for the subscription list and
the standing of “The Quiver.” When she had finished three cups of tea
and uncounted muffins, she settled back in a corner of the Tally-ho
stall with a sigh of complete satisfaction.

“Now,” she said, “I’ll tell you all about it. It’s much too good a
story to mix up with crumpets and tea, like ordinary conversation. And
don’t interrupt, or I shall be sorry I came.”

Awestruck silence met this dire announcement, and Madeline began.

“I wrote you about the interview I couldn’t get, the dinner Miss Dwight
wouldn’t come to, the time she snapped Dick off so short, and all that.
There were other things of the same kind--a reception the Woman’s
College Club gave for her, when she swept in looking like a princess,
made a funny, fascinating little speech, and swept out again. Well, I
was to have introduced her to people that afternoon, and I’d counted
on making her notice me and so getting my chance. I didn’t get it that
way, but I made a discovery.

“I found that a girl who had a walking part in the first act of her
play and another in the last, and who was down on the bills as Annette
Weeks for one and Felicia Trench for the other, was a Harding girl
named plain Mary Smith. That is, she didn’t graduate, but was here a
year or two just before our time. Well, I went to that ridiculous play
every night for a week, until I knew every bit of the Weeks-Trench
business as well as Mary Smith herself. Then I waited for her at the
stage door after a matinée, took her for tea somewhere, told her what I
wanted, and begged her to play sick and let me do her part for a week
or two.

“At first she laughed at me--said she might play sick all she could,
but I wouldn’t get the place. Besides, I was taller than she. What
would I do for clothes? Before I could get the dresses made the play
would be done for. For a minute I was stumped by that--I hadn’t thought
of clothes. Then I remembered Eleanor’s super-elegant wardrobe, and
I knew she’d lend me some things under the circumstances. And I saw
that Mary Smith was in the same mood as Miss Dwight,--discouraged over
the play and worried at being left in mid-season without a part. So
I talked hard, all about my play and the honor of Harding, and the
college girl’s elevating the stage by writing as well as by acting.
And then I put it to her: ‘You’ve got nothing much to lose, and I’ve
got everything to gain. Can you act?’ She shook her head. ‘Miss Dwight
took me on because she wants to encourage nice girls to go on the
stage. There’s a walking part in nearly every play, so she’s kept me.’
‘There’s a walking part in my play,’ I told her, ‘and if this one isn’t
good for over two weeks you can rest and go to the theatre and save
your dresses for another part.’ ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Of course you
get the salary,’ I said. ‘Give me a pencil,’ she said, ‘and I’ll write
you the reference.’ That’s how I landed in Agatha Dwight’s company,
exactly two weeks ago to-night.”

Madeline paused dramatically. Mary Brooks opened her mouth to ask a
question, and closed it again hastily, gasping like a fish. Helen
Chase Adams got as far as the initial “burble” of “but,” and stopped
spasmodically. Madeline had impressed them all with the importance of
obeying the rules of the occasion.

“That,” she said, looking around the circle with a pleased smile, “is
chapter one. The next thing was to get Her Highness to notice me. The
first night, as she swept by me on her way to her car, she inquired for
the girl I’d ousted, and said it was refreshing to find an understudy
who didn’t need breaking in. After that she never looked at me for four
days except in the scenes, and then with a vacant sort of a stare and
a stage smile. But the next night she turned giddy in the first act,
and I managed to improvise a parlor story that fitted well enough into
the scene while she snuffed smelling-salts and pulled herself together,
so that the audience never guessed that anything was wrong. She looked
awfully angry--at herself or me, I couldn’t tell which. But the manager
patted me on the back, and perhaps because he told her to she sent for
me to come to her in the long intermission. And I went, of course, and
she asked me all about myself, and she liked my answers. So I plunged
right in. The manager spent the night finding my play for her, and she
spent the morning reading it and the afternoon talking to me about it,
and the next day they began rehearsals--with the walking lady back
in her part. I explained about her, and Miss Dwight thought it was a
lovely story. She’s got a real Harding sense of humor; and she’s coming
up here before long to see the place. That’s all.” Madeline leaned
forward to reach for the muffin plate, and perceiving it to be empty
hastily leaned back again.

Mary summoned Nora. “More muffins, please,” she ordered, “and don’t
look so reproachful, Nora, please, over our appetites. Miss Madeline
has been too busy lately proving that she’s a genius to take time to
eat. Now she’s making up for it.”

“Oh, and is that what’s to pay?” said Nora, smiling comprehensively at
the B. C. A.’s. “Provin’ anything is hard worrk. I could never prove
me sums at school. That’s because they was generally wrong. It’s awful
hard to prove what ain’t so, ain’t it now, Miss Madeline?” And Nora
departed amiably for more muffins, ignoring the bursts of laughter that
followed her. Nora had long since ceased to attach any significance to
the laughter of the Harding girls. They laughed just as other people
breathed. It was as unaccountable as the enormous number of muffins
they consumed.

They were still laughing when Nora came back with Mary’s order. They
sent her off again for hot tea, and they drank Madeline’s health in
it, and Miss Dwight’s, and the health of the Walking Lady who had
helped Madeline to play out her trump card. They congratulated Madeline
riotously, they made wonderful plans for Miss Dwight’s visit to
Harding, and others for seeing the first night of the play.

“We are at last justified in the eyes of the wide, wide world,”
declaimed Mary pompously. “We’ve been called the cleverest crowd in
college, and now we’ve shown ’em. A well-kept husband like mine and a
well-kept tea-room like Betty’s are nice little features, but a play
for Agatha Dwight is the real thing. And the moral of that is: Look
out for a genius, and the grand-stand play will look out for itself.”

“And the moral of that,” said little Helen Chase Adams primly, “is that
it’s time for faculty wives to dress for dinner.”

“Also campus faculty,” added Rachel hastily, and the most exciting B.
C. A. tea-drinking of the season reluctantly dispersed.




CHAPTER XIV

AS A BULL PUP ORDAINS


HARDING COLLEGE was almost as excited over Madeline’s play as the B. C.
A.’s had been.

“Why, she wrote it in this very town,” wide-eyed freshmen told each
other.

“In this very room, maybe,” diners at the Tally-ho added wonderingly.

“And she’s only been out of college a year and a half.”

“I guess our little Catherine will be heard from some day. Miss Ayres
was the leading literary light of her class, just like Cath. I can tell
you these college reputations mean something!”

“Did you hear how she got Miss Dwight to read her play?”

“What’s it about, anyway?”

“Nobody knows--it’s a dead secret. But college girls come into it, I
guess, because Miss Dwight is going to visit Miss Ayres up here--to
study the atmosphere, I suppose.”

“I’m going in for elocution this next semester. If I get a good part in
the senior play, I shall seriously consider going on the stage. Miss
Dwight encourages college girls to do that. She thinks it offers a
splendid field for educated women.”

So was Harding College once more stage-struck, and Miss Dick’s school
as well. The Smallest Sister carried the great news there, and Frisky
Fenton and her crowd bought Miss Dwight’s pictures to adorn their
dressers, and bribed the Smallest Sister, by the subtlest arts known to
the big girl for beguiling the little one, to arrange a dinner-party
for them at the Tally-ho on the night when Miss Dwight was to be there.

“You promised me a spread down there long ago,” the Smallest Sister
urged Betty.

“But I shall be so very busy that night,” Betty objected. “Couldn’t you
come by yourself then, and have the party later?”

“But the others want to see her just as much as I do,” Dorothy urged.
“Frisky said she would about die of joy if she could see her, and so
will all of them. And they’ve been awfully nice to me.”

“All right,” said Betty resignedly, “only I can’t sit with you and
you’ll probably have a very poor dinner, because the tea-shop will be
so crowded.”

After all, one table more or less wouldn’t matter, she reflected, on a
night when practically every Harding girl would try to get her dinner
at the Tally-ho.

Miss Dwight off the stage was a demure little lady with wonderful eyes,
a smile that made people who saw it smile back in spite of themselves,
and a voice that thrilled one no matter what its owner said. Her hair
was gray, and so were her clothes, when they weren’t black. She hated
attention, shrank forlornly behind Madeline when the girls stared or
sang to her, and only came to dinner at the Tally-ho because Madeline
had assured her that it was, at the dinner-hour, the very soul and
centre of the college world.

Having come, she exclaimed rapturously at all the “features,” and
then, perceiving that she was the chief of them, she hid in the
remotest corner of Jack o’ Hearts’ stall, with Madeline on one side
for protection and Mary and Betty to talk to across the way. Her
big hat drooped so far over her face that girls who rudely looked
in as they went by the stall saw nothing but the soft curve of her
cheek and her chin cleft by a big dimple--unless it happened to be a
moment when she had boldly resolved to look out upon these “wonderful,
frightful collegians.” Then she lifted the brim of the absurd hat with
a fascinating gesture, and smiled her clear, childlike smile at the
curious passers-by.

Dorothy’s table was the one nearest to Jack o’ Hearts’ stall, so that
she and her friends came in for a generous share of Miss Dwight’s
smiling inspection of her surroundings. But that wasn’t enough for
Frisky Fenton.

“I’ve just got to speak to her,” she declared. “If she’s as retiring as
you say, Dot, I’m afraid we shan’t get any chance later. I think I’ll
go over there now.”

“But I’m afraid Betty wouldn’t like it,” objected the Smallest Sister
anxiously.

“Well, if she doesn’t, she won’t blame you,” retorted Frisky, “and I
shan’t mind being in hot water with her, as long as I get a chance
to talk to Miss Dwight. I can make it all right with your sister
afterward, I’m sure.”

“Please don’t go, Frisky,” begged Dorothy, sending imploring glances
across at Betty, who was perfectly oblivious of the Smallest Sister’s
efforts. “It’s not polite to go where you’re not invited. Betty said
she’d have us meet Miss Dwight later if she could.”

Frisky gave an irritating little laugh. “You don’t understand about
such things, dear. I’m not a child, to be sent for with dessert.”
And with that she jumped up and crossed quickly to Jack o’ Hearts’
stall, where she appeared, a very pretty, demure, totally inexplicable
vision, before the astonished party of diners. She nodded to Betty and
Madeline, smiled at Mary, and curtseyed, with dropped eyes, before Miss
Dwight.

“Excuse me, Miss Dwight,” she said sweetly, “but do you think I’d be a
success on the stage? I’m crazy about it.”

Miss Dwight laughed heartily at the absurd question. “Sit down, my
dear,” she said, not seeming to mind the unwarranted invasion of her
privacy. “Are you one of these astonishing Harding girls?”

“No, I’m only at school,” explained Frisky calmly, “but I’m as old as
some college girls. And anyway, isn’t it better to begin acting when
you’re very young?”

Miss Dwight stared at her, a sombre shadow in her great dark eyes.
“You’re far too pretty to begin young,” she said. “Some day, if you
really want it, and your mother is willing----”

“I’ve only a stepmother,” put in Frisky airily, “so I needn’t consider
that.”

Miss Dwight looked at her again. “It’s a hard life, my dear--a long
pull, and very little besides more hard work for you if you win, and if
you never do make good--and most of us don’t----”

“Oh, please don’t discourage me,” Frisky broke in impulsively. “It’s
the one thing in life for me.”

“Wait till you have some idea about life before you say that,” Miss
Dwight advised her rather sharply. “Make friends with your stepmother,
to begin with. If you can do that now, perhaps some day you can make
friends with an audience. Go back to school and study hard. Read the
great plays and the great poems. And in five years, if you’re still
stage-struck, come to me--and I’ll give you some more good advice.
Good-bye, my dear.” She held out her hand with a definite gesture of
dismissal that even Frisky could not ignore.

“Good-bye, and thank you,” said the girl, “but five years is an awfully
long time to wait, Miss Dwight. You may see me sooner.”

With which parting shot, Frisky returned to her horrified friends more
stage-struck than ever, and more confident of her ability to manage any
situation to her liking. Her vanity would have received a severe shock
if she had heard Miss Dwight call her a silly child, Madeline emphasize
the fact that Frisky wasn’t a college girl, or a type of even the
shallowest variety, and Betty confide to Mary Brooks Hinsdale that she
was thoroughly ashamed of the Smallest Sister’s new chum.

The next morning Frisky sent Miss Dwight a bunch of violets and
a gushing note, which her divinity refused to read because “the
handwriting made her nervous.” But there was also a note from Helena
Mason, enclosing a little verse which she asked permission to print
in the next “Argus.” Miss Dwight laughed and cried over it, declared
it was the best thing that had ever been written about her, and
made Madeline take her at once to see the author, who gushed, in
conversation, as badly as Frisky had on paper, and seemed to have
the vaguest possible ideas about Miss Dwight’s genius, which she had
described so aptly in her poetical mood.

“All literary people are bores but you, my dear,” Miss Dwight declared,
hurrying Madeline away. “I discovered that years ago, but I’m always
forgetting it again. If anybody else sends me a poem, please remind me
to shun her. Time in Harding is too precious to be wasted.”

Miss Dwight could stay away from New York only two days--“two sweet,
stolen days,” she called them. Then she hurried back to the rehearsals,
leaving Madeline in Betty’s charge.

“She’s done all that she can for her play now,” she explained, “and
she’d far better stay here. She might make us nervous, and she’d
certainly make herself miserable. Rehearsals are such contrary things.
They’ve gone so abominably up to now that I’m absolutely sure the play
will be a hit.”

The nature of the hit was still a mystery. Madeline, Miss Dwight, and
her manager were all stubbornly dumb. The title wasn’t even put on the
bill-boards until a week before the opening night, and then it might
mean anything--“Her Choice.”

Nearly all the B. C. A.’s were going down to see the first performance,
but the one who was most excited at the prospect, next to Madeline,
was undoubtedly Eleanor Watson. Her gowns had figured in Madeline’s
“walking part,” but that wasn’t the chief reason for her interest in
the play. The great thing was that Richard Blake was giving a box party
and a supper, and he had asked her and Jim to come. Dick had almost
never taken her anywhere, and this winter he had been too busy even to
come often to call. Yet Madeline seemed to see a good deal of him.

“He doesn’t care for me. Why should he?” Eleanor had reflected sadly.
“He likes Madeline because she’s clever about the same sort of things
that he is interested in. And yet when he does come to see me, he looks
and acts as if----”

And then Dick had telephoned about the box party. “It’s almost never
that I can ask you to anything you really care about,” he had said, “so
do say you’ll come this time.”

And when Eleanor had accepted, declaring that she always enjoyed doing
things with him, he had taken her challenge. “Then I shall ask a pretty
girl for your brother and two dull pairs of devoted people who won’t
bother us. Remember it’s to be our very own party--only I can’t come
for you because ‘The Quiver’ goes to press that night, and I shall have
a form to ‘O. K.’ between seven and eight.”

Eleanor decided to wear her new yellow dress. At noon a huge bunch of
violets arrived with Dick’s card. At three Jim sent a messenger for his
evening clothes. He wouldn’t be able to get home to dinner. He might
come for Eleanor at quarter to eight; if not, he would send a cab.
Eleanor went across the street very early to the hotel where they took
their dinners, and afterward slipped out of her street clothes and into
a kimono, and curled up on the couch by the sitting-room fire to rest
until it was time to dress for the evening. By and by she stretched
luxuriously, sat up, and without turning on a light went down the
hall to her room. As she felt for the electric switch a low angry
growl sounded from within. It was Peter Pan, Jim’s new bulldog. He was
feeling neglected, probably. Jim took him for a walk or romped with him
indoors nearly every evening.

“Why, Peter!” Eleanor called persuasively. “Poor old Peter Pan! Were
you lonely and bored and very cross?”

Another growl, and the noise of Peter’s claws digging into the matting,
as he scrambled to his feet. Eleanor turned on the light hastily, but
Peter, unpropitiated and growling angrily, came forward a step or two
and stood defiantly, ready to resist any encroachment on his domain.

“Why, Peter, you silly dog,” coaxed Eleanor. “Don’t you know me? Did
you think I was a burglar coming in the dark to rob your dear master?
Well, I’m not. Come here, Peter, good dog!”

Generally Peter would have come pattering across the floor, eager to
lick Eleanor’s hand. To-night he only growled again and showed his
teeth. Eleanor had had very little experience with dogs, and she was
horribly frightened at Peter’s extraordinary behavior. She remembered
that when she came down to New York and was introduced to the apartment
and to the room that Jim had moved out of because it was the largest
and pleasantest he had to offer her, Jim had warned her to “go slow”
with Peter Pan.

“He seems to have a little prejudice against strangers, especially
ladies,” Jim had said. “He snapped pretty hard at the janitor’s wife
one day when she was making my bed. She won’t come in now unless he’s
out or chained. Don’t try to pet him if he acts cross. He may resent
your moving into my special quarters.”

But Peter Pan had never acted cross or regarded Eleanor as an
interloper, and Eleanor had petted him, taken him walking in the park,
and quite forgotten Jim’s warning until now.

“Peter,” began Eleanor desperately again, “please stop growling. I’ve
got to dress, and to do that I’ve got to come in where you are and go
right past you to my dressing-room. Now be a good dog and cheer up.”
Peter Pan paid no attention to this pathetic appeal. He growled again
in a low but menacing key, and yawned, showing all his teeth once more
in the process.

Eleanor shivered and retreated a step or two so that she could see the
clock in the sitting-room. Twenty minutes past seven; if Jim came for
her, she could dress and arrive late, but if not---- On a chair near
the door of her room were the walking skirt and blouse she had taken
off. Near by were her black pumps. She had changed her stockings to a
pair of pale yellow silk ones, leaving those she had taken off in the
dressing-room, with her yellow dress and evening cape. Unless Jim came,
she must appear at Dick’s party in yellow stockings, black shoes, a
mussy linen blouse, and a blue serge street-suit, or she must pass that
growling dog twice in order to get her evening things. She wouldn’t be
downed! There was a dog-whip in the hall; she would get that and armed
with it make the fatal dash. Then she remembered Jim’s warning. “He’s
a dandy dog, but a puppy’s temper is always uncertain. So go slow and
don’t get near him when he’s low in his mind.”

Visions of herself pinioned helplessly in Peter Pan’s vise-like grip
until Jim, frightened at her failure to appear at the theatre, should
appear, perhaps after she had endured hours of agony, to rescue her,
kept Eleanor from going after the dog-whip. Bulldogs did maim and even
kill people. Even a yellow dress, chosen especially to suit Dick’s
fastidious taste, wasn’t worth that risk. But if she went in her street
suit they would all laugh at her and say that there wasn’t any risk.
Two big tears dropped from Eleanor’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
She brushed them away scornfully, and crooning soft speeches to Peter
Pan reached for the black pumps, the mussy blouse, and the walking
skirt. Having secured them, she slammed the door upon the hateful dog,
locked it, and dressed before the tiny mirror over the mantelpiece. Her
tricorn hat and her coat were in the hall, but Dick’s violets were in
the dressing-room. Eleanor almost wept again as she thought of them. If
only Jim came for her! But he didn’t--he sent a puffing taxi, whose
driver stared curiously at her yellow stockings as he held open the
door for her.

Everybody in the theatre lobby seemed to be staring. Eleanor’s face
flushed as she hurried to Dick’s box. As she pulled back the curtain
Dick jumped to meet her--and he stared at her stockings. The dull
devoted ladies and the pretty girl for Jim were in very elaborate
evening gowns--and they stared at her stockings, then at her mussy
shirt-waist, and her plain little hat.

“Introduce me quick,” pleaded Eleanor softly to Dick, who was trying to
take her coat, “and then I can explain my clothes. No, I can’t take off
my coat. It’s all the fault of that horrid, hateful Peter Pan.”

Dick smiled at her blandly. “You look just as lovely as usual. In fact
I like you best of all in plain dark things. Didn’t some violets come?”

“They were in the dressing-room too, behind that miserable dog. If Jim
ever comes--I must sit somewhere back in a corner.”

“You must sit there with me beside you.” Dick pointed to a chair in the
front of the box.

“Don’t you really mind?” demanded Eleanor. “Of course the stockings are
the worst, and they won’t show----”

“I asked _you_ to come to our very own party,” Dick told her, “not your
clothes. I’ve got plenty of clothes here already. Come and meet them,
and tell them about the horrid Peter Pan. Did he chew up your entire
wardrobe while you were out?”

It was a very funny story when once you were free to see it that way.
The dull devoted couples got quite hysterical over it. Jim, when he
came, was almost as bad, though he assured his sister soberly that she
had done very well to “play safe” when Peter Pan was low in his mind.

“Most girls think all a man cares for is clothes,” said Dick, as the
orchestra played with lowered lights waiting for the first curtain.

“And most men think a girl cares only for flowers and candy and
suppers.”

“Before the wedding--and clothes and servants and all the luxuries
she’s used to afterward,” added Dick a little bitterly.

“Whereas,” Eleanor took him up, “if a girl loves a man, she is willing
to do without all but the plainest, simplest necessities. What she
wants is a chance to help him, to be with him through thick and thin,
to watch him make good, and to feel that she has a little bit of a
share in the fine things he’s doing and going to do.”

She never could have said it if the lights had been on. She even
flushed in the dark as she saw Dick lean forward to look into her eyes.

“Do you mean,” he asked eagerly, “that you’d feel that way yourself?”

“I mean that any and every nice girl feels that way.”

Just then the curtain went up, but for all Dick’s interest in
Madeline’s play, his hand was crushing one of Eleanor’s, and his heart
was pounding so hard that the first act was half over before he had
gathered his wits to know what it was all about.

The minute the curtain rang down, Dick turned to Eleanor. “In that
case,” he said under cover of the applause, “you’ve got to promise to
marry me now. I can give you a good deal besides love and a chance to
help, but I’ve waited almost two years without daring to say a word,
and I’ve been frightened to death for fear I should lose you to some
fellow who could speak sooner.”

“You needn’t have worried,” Eleanor told him, “because I was waiting
too. But I consider that you’ve wasted two whole years for me out of my
life. You’ll have that to make up for, monsieur. Can you do it?”

“I can only try,” said Dick very soberly.

The play was a triumph for Miss Dwight and for the author. That young
person was sitting alone in the last row of the peanut gallery.
Occasionally she pinched herself to make sure that she was awake, and
just before the final curtain fell she crept softly out and went home
by herself in a jolting, jangling Broadway car. There Dick and Eleanor
found her rocking by the fire, the inevitable black kitten in her lap.

“Come to supper,” Dick said. “You promised, and the taxi waits.”

Madeline smiled dreamily up at them and patted the kitten. “Yes, Dick,
I’ll come to supper as long as I needn’t dress up for it. What’s the
matter, Eleanor?”

“I want to know how you knew,” demanded Eleanor eagerly. “How you
guessed exactly how I’ve felt all these years about--about everything
and--and Dick.”

Madeline smiled. “If every woman in the audience wants to know that,”
she said, “the play goes. The shop-girl next me in the gallery wants to
know, and Miss Dwight, and now you---- Excuse me, Eleanor, but where
did you get those stockings?”




CHAPTER XV

A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SEEK--WITH “FEATURES”


BABE seized upon Eleanor’s engagement as the best possible excuse for a
week-end party.

“Living in a castle is rather a fright,” she confided to Betty. “John
doesn’t mind it, because he’s always lived in a near-castle. I get
lost. I’m afraid of the butler. The English housekeeper drops her
aitches so fast that I can’t tell what she wants to ask me. I forget
the names of my horses. And when John is in town I haven’t anybody to
play with.”

“Seems to me you’re not a very enthusiastic newly-wed,” Betty told her
laughingly.

“Oh, yes, I am,” Babe declared very earnestly. “I love John, and I love
Father Morton, and I love my house. Only I rattle around in it like a
pea in a band-box. While I’m growing up to fit my surroundings I’ve got
to have the assistance of all my friends. Will you come to my party,
Betty? I’m going to ask Father Morton, because he knows Mr. Blake, and
besides he missed all the fun of the wedding.”

So Betty, resolving to “’tend up” to business strictly for the rest of
the year, took another week-end off to celebrate the engagement, see
Babe’s gorgeous mansion, and help make up to Mr. Morton for losing the
wedding--all on her account, as he persisted in saying.

Babe’s house, which had been Mr. Morton’s wedding gift to her, was up
on the Hudson, in a suburb so discreetly removed from the noise and
dust of the railroad that nobody lived there except “carriage people.”
The wide roads wound in sweeping curves along the river, between
lilac hedges, now capped with snow. In front, Babe’s territory sloped
through great gardens to the water; behind she had a real wood of her
own. Inside the house the stately rooms were crowded with expensive
furniture and beautiful bric-à-brac. Mr. Morton had taken Babe shopping
and bought everything she had as much as stopped to look at. A famous
decorator had been sent up to arrange the house and fill in the
gaps. There was a fireplace taken bodily from a Florentine palace,
a Rembrandt that had once graced a royal gallery, a rug that men had
spent their whole lives in weaving.

“I shall never know what we’ve got,” sighed Babe, as she led the way
through her domain. “Father Morton loves to surprise people. He says I
haven’t discovered half the special features that he’s put in just to
amuse me.”

“If I were you I should feel like a princess in a fairy tale,” sighed
little Helen Adams, who had never in her life imagined anything half so
splendid.

“I don’t,” said Babe stoutly. “Princesses have to wear long velvet
dresses and look sweet all the time. Just as soon as I dare, I’m going
to get rid of at least half the servants, so I can roll up my sleeves
and go down to the kitchen. I learned to make bread at cooking-school
before I was married, and it was a picnic.” Babe paused and gazed
joyously at her guests. “I’ve thought what would be a picnic to do
right on this very afternoon, before you’ve even seen the rest of the
house. To play hide-and-go-seek.”

“Babe,” began Mary Brooks sternly, “you’re still the Perfect Infant.
Do you think it befits married ladies like you and me to indulge in
children’s games?”

Babe answered by running down the long hall, pulling the reluctant Mary
after her.

“John,” she cried when they reached the little library that John had
seized upon for his den and in which he was now entertaining the
masculine portion of the house party, “John, we’re going to play
hide-and-seek all over the house. Isn’t that a grand idea?”

“Great,” agreed the devoted John.

“Then come along, everybody,” ordered Babe. “Will you play too, Father
Morton?”

“Of course I will,” said Jasper J. Morton testily. “One of the things
this house is intended for is a good game of hide-and-seek. I didn’t
forget that you were a little tomboy, child. I didn’t expect you to
grow up all at once just because you’d promised to love and obey my boy
John.” Jasper J. Morton paused to chuckle. “Some of the best features
of this house are still undiscovered. Maybe they’ll come out in the
course of this game.”

Babe hugged him rapturously. “We discovered the hidden bowling-alley
last week,” she said. “You were a duck to put in so many surprises
right under my very nose, when I thought I was picking out everything
and doing all the planning myself.”

Mr. Morton laughed gleefully. “You like my surprises, do you?
Independently of their being surprises, I mean. When young people build
a house they never think of the most important things. For instance,
there’s no reason, just because you’re going to have a new house, why
you shouldn’t keep to some of the good old ways. Most new houses are no
earthly good for little tomboys to play in. Do you hear that, Watson?
Too bad I got this place started before I met you. You’d have learned a
lot of things about your business if you’d built this house for me.”

“I don’t doubt that, sir,” said Jim dutifully.

“Keep your eyes open this afternoon,” Mr. Morton advised him
mysteriously. “There are features in this house that the head of your
firm wouldn’t be capable of inventing. Architects are like sheep--they
follow the last fashions. Now when I’ve been abroad, I’ve studied
buildings over there. When I see a good thing in some old house in
a little moss-grown town like Harding, I remember it. I also study
character. Just as Morton Hall is adapted to Miss B. A. and her
protégées, so this place is adapted to John and this little tomboy.
I exercise prevision when I build. Why, I foresaw this very game of
hide-and-seek, so to speak. Just give a little study to the habits and
tastes of your clients, my boy, and you’ll make a name for yourself.
That’s the way to build; study character and exercise foresight.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jim respectfully.

“Eny, meeny, miny, mo,” began Babe hastily, having had quite enough of
architectural theories. The lot of being “it” first fell upon her, and
John’s den was chosen as goal.

“Remember,” Babe told them, “you can go anywhere except to the kitchen.
I shouldn’t dare to chase you there. Open any door that you see----”

“Particularly any door you don’t quite see,” put in Jasper J. Morton
mysteriously.

“It’s too early for skeletons,” laughed John, “so you needn’t be
afraid of the closets.”

“I shall count my hundred awfully fast,” announced Babe, suiting the
action to the words with a promptness that sent her guests scuttling
for hiding-places.

The first person to be caught was Helen Adams, who confessed that she
hadn’t dared to go into any rooms but the down-stairs ones that were
obviously meant for guests; and nobody had gone far or had happened
upon any very difficult hiding-places. But the next time, led by Babe,
the party ranged far afield, and it took so long to find them all that
a ten-minute limit was arranged; after ten minutes’ hunting those who
were not found could “come in free.” Nobody was surprised that Dick
and Eleanor should forget this privilege at the end of a round, but
when Betty had twice failed to appear Babe declared that she must have
found one of Father Morton’s real hiding-places, and the whole party
started off in search of her. Up-stairs and down again they went,
opening closets, hunting in chests, under beds, behind portières. Babe
declared that she was at last learning the way around her domain, and
discovering any number of extra cupboards and closets; but neither she
nor anybody else discovered Betty.

At four the butler caught his flyaway little mistress long enough to
announce to her that tea was served in the yellow drawing-room.

“We shall have to go,” she said sadly, rounding up her guests. “I
shouldn’t dare to tell him that we were too busy playing hide-and-seek.
Besides, I’m hungry, for one. Betty will hear us all in there together,
and know we’ve given her up and come out. Let’s all shout together ‘We
give up’!”

So the big house echoed to their chanted “We give up,” and then they
repaired to the yellow drawing-room, where Babe sat on a carved oak
throne and poured tea, from a wonderful silver pot wreathed with
dragons, into cups so fragile that you could have crushed them as you
would a flower. There were muffins and crackers and sweet sandwiches
and nuts and ginger, all of which tasted very good to the hungry
“hiders.” And in the midst of tea there was an excitement, in the shape
of a telegram summoning Mr. Morton, Senior, to a conference on board a
train that would reach this station in less than ten minutes.

“Have to miss dinner, I suppose, but I’ll be back to-night sure,” he
grumbled as Babe pulled on his coat, John found his gloves and hat, a
valet packed his bag, in case of emergency, and the butler rang for
the chauffeur to bring around a limousine. “Where’s Miss B. A.?” he
demanded as the car appeared. “Hasn’t she come out yet? Well, if the
rest of you have any gumption, you’ll take her dare and find her. I
say, Watson, you know how a house is built, and you know that Miss B.
A. is worth finding----”

“Train’s whistling, dad,” broke in John.

“Then the automobile speed limit has got to go smash again,” said
Jasper J. Morton resignedly, jumping into the car. “Find her, Watson.
She’s worth it,” he called back, waving his hand spasmodically as the
car shot round a curve and out of sight.

Most of the young people had gathered in the hall to see Mr. Morton
off, but little Helen Adams, feeling rather shy and out-of-place, had
crept back into the drawing-room, which, lighted only by the fire and
the candles on the tea-table, seemed so rich and dim and lovely that to
be alone in it made her give a long deep sigh of joy and satisfaction
and wonder at the idea of plain little Helen Chase Adams spending the
week-end with a gay house party in such a splendid place.

She had just seated herself in a great cushioned chair by the fire to
enjoy it all--Helen was one of the people who must be alone to drink
their pleasures to the full--when she heard a little tap on the wall so
close to her that it made her jump. But in a minute she settled back
again comfortably. “Mice or a bit of loose plaster,” she decided. But
an instant later there came a little low moan--an eery sort of muffled
cry--and this time she screamed and jumped quite out of her chair. The
door had just been shut after Mr. Morton, and Babe came running in,
followed by all the others, and at a respectful distance by the stately
butler, to ask what the matter was.

“Why, I don’t know,” said Helen anxiously. “Something or somebody cried
out in another room, and it sounded so near me and so queer, some way,
that I screamed. I’m sorry I frightened all the rest of you too.”

“Mamie the parlor-maid always gives a heartrending shriek when she
breaks one of my favorite wedding presents,” suggested Babe mournfully.
“It was probably Mamie--only why should she be dusting and breaking
things at this time of day?”

“Why indeed?” demanded Madeline scornfully. “Did it sound like a
pathetic parlor-maid, Helen?”

“It didn’t sound like any real person,” Helen explained slowly. “It was
muffled and far away and choked--like a--why, like a ghost!”

“Exactly,” cried Madeline triumphantly. “Babe, don’t you see what’s
happened? One of the highly advertised features of your domicile has
come to light. Your respected father-in-law, realizing that no castle
is complete without a ghost--he remembered Babbie’s, probably--built in
one, warranted to appear to persons sitting alone in the firelight. And
you try to pretend it’s only a parlor-maid in distress.”

“I hope it wasn’t Betty in distress,” put in Eleanor Watson.

“I’m really afraid she’s locked in somewhere,” said Babe anxiously.
“Didn’t a girl in an old story once hide in a chest in a game like
this, and get faint and finally smother? Did the noise sound as if it
could have been Betty, Helen?”

Helen confessed that it might have been almost anything.

“Thomas,” Babe turned to the butler, “will you please take two of the
servants and hunt in the cellar for Miss Wales? I’ll take the up-stairs
rooms, and John, you and the men hunt down here, and then go up to the
attic. Open all the chests and cupboards. Oh, dear, I wish this house
wasn’t so big!”

Search “up-stairs, down-stairs, and in my lady’s chamber” revealed no
Betty. Eleanor, passing the door of the yellow drawing-room, thought
she heard another cry, but when, reinforced by Dick and John, she went
in to listen for its repetition, all was still. Nobody was under the
furniture or in the next room, and the open fires in both rooms made
the chimney an impossible retreat. But it was from near the chimney
that Eleanor thought the cry had come, and Helen had been sitting near
the fire when it sounded in her ear.

“She must be in one of the secret chambers that Mr. Morton broadly
hinted at,” said Madeline finally. “But why, if she went in, doesn’t
she come out?”

Jim Watson had been frenziedly active in searching chests and
cupboards. Now he was knocking on the wall near the fireplace and
running back and forth between the two adjoining rooms, taking note of
the position and thickness of the partitions.

“There’s a passage between these rooms,” he announced at last, “and
a shaft or a staircase or something running up in this corner.
See--there’s a square taken out. But how you get in, I can’t see.”

“Oh, do try to see,” begged Babe eagerly. “You know Father Morton said
you could learn a lot from this house. I wish we knew for sure that she
was in there and”--Babe choked a little--“all right.”

“Knock hard on the wall,” suggested Mr. Blake. “Maybe she’ll hear that
better than our talking, and answer it.”

Regardless of priceless wall-hangings Babe seized a pair of brass tongs
and pounded on the wall as if she meant to break it down.

“Go easy, Babe,” advised Madeline, but Babe only pounded harder.

“If she’s in there we want to know that she’s all right,” declared Babe
hotly. “And then we’ve got to get her out if we have to batter down
this wall to do it.”

“How will you know Betty’s knock from a ghost’s?” demanded Madeline
flippantly, but no one paid any attention to her because just at that
moment a faint knock did sound on the other side of the wall.

Babe gave a little cry of relief. “Then she isn’t suffocated! That
story has just been haunting me. Now, Mr. Watson, you know how a house
is built, to quote Father Morton. You must find how to get to her.”

Jim looked as if he wanted to use the tongs as a battering-ram, but he
refrained. “I’ll try up-stairs,” he said. “Maybe the entrance is there.”

“I’ll show you which rooms are over these,” volunteered John.

But there was no opening up-stairs.

It was Helen Adams who made the next suggestion. “If a stairway goes
up, mightn’t it go down too? Perhaps you can enter from the cellar.”

And sure enough half-way down the cellar stairs Jim discovered a little
door.

“May be a snap lock that’s kept her in,” he muttered irritably. “Hold
it open, Eleanor. Here, Thomas, let’s have your electric bug. Hello,
Betty! Betty, I say!”

“Here I am,” called a faint, frightened little voice from up above.
“Here I am, but where I am I don’t know, and I think I’ve sprained my
ankle.”

Ensconced on the couch in John’s den Betty had her belated tea, while
Babe rubbed the turned ankle vigorously, and the others stood around
listening to the tale of ghostly adventures.

“I got in up-stairs,” Betty explained, “through a sliding panel sort of
thing that opens out of that curved part of the hall.”

“Of course,” Jim put in. “We looked on the other side.”

[Illustration: THE OTHERS STOOD AROUND LISTENING]

“I shut the door so no one else would find it,” explained Betty, “and
of course it was pretty dark, though there is a little high window
opening into the hall to light the first part of the passage.”

“I know--looks like a ventilator,” interrupted Jim again.

“But when I came to the flight of stairs, I didn’t see them,” Betty
took up her story, “and I wasn’t expecting stairs, so I fell most of
the way down and landed with one foot under me. I was frightened and
the pain made me faint. I called once, but nobody answered. I felt as
if I was in an old dungeon, like those we saw in France, and if I moved
or called rats would come and bite me, or I should drop into a well and
drown. Besides, I hadn’t the least idea how to get back. Of course it
was perfectly silly. I called once more after a long while, and once
I thought I heard some one scream. And then, ages after, there were
knocks and I knocked back. That’s all. Did some one really scream or
did I imagine that?”

“I did. I thought it was a ghost,” explained Helen.

Betty laughed. “I’m pursued by ghosts these days. The Morton Hall girls
hear them, and Dorothy and poor little Shirley Ware--why, I wonder
if there could be a secret passageway at Miss Dick’s! It’s an old,
rambling sort of house. I must ask about it when I go back.”

But by the time Betty had spent a week on a couch at Babe’s, recovering
from her sprained ankle, her mind was so full of more important things
which must be attended to “at once if not sooner,” to quote Emily’s
delightful formula, that she quite forgot to inquire of Miss Dick about
the secret passage. It was better, too, perhaps, to let sleeping dogs
lie. Shirley was back at school again, and her wan little face must be
a sad reminder to any big girl who had played a practical joke on her.
Miss Dick still felt sure that there had been no joke--that Shirley had
conjured up a ghost out of her own imagination. It would be a bad plan,
possibly, to stir the matter up again.




CHAPTER XVI

THE MYSTERY DEEPENS


AT least once every week Betty dropped into Mrs. Post’s room to talk
over the progress of their charges and the state of the house in
general.

“The Goop is as bad as ever,” Betty complained one windy afternoon
in March. “I’ve just been up in her room--she’s begun again throwing
whatever she doesn’t need at the moment under her bed, and whenever
she’s in a hurry or especially happy at meal times she shovels things
in with her knife. Do you think she ought to be allowed to stay here
another year?”

“Maybe she’ll decide to stop studying and teach for a while,” suggested
the optimistic Mrs. Post. “She’s thinking of it. But if it’s important
for her to learn tidiness and table manners--which it certainly is--she
certainly is more likely to do it here than anywhere else, with me
nagging at her and you looking sweet and sorry. Now I’ll warrant she’s
down on her knees this very minute clearing up her floor, because
you saw it looking disorderly. She thinks a lot of pleasing you. And
the other girls don’t mind her habits much; she’s good for them as a
horrible example.”

“The Twin Digs have been reported again for lights after ten,” said
Betty, who was in a downhearted mood.

“Only once since--since--well, I’m afraid I can’t truthfully say since
Christmas,” laughed Mrs. Post. “I guess what those two need is a show
of firmness. I’ll see them to-night and tell them that the very next
time means a report to President Wallace.”

“Miss Romance has had three callers again this week, hasn’t she?”

“Three calls, but only one caller. She’s settled down to one now, and I
guess he’s all right--he seems to be a real nice country boy. He lives
in the little place where she does, and he walks six miles and back
each time he comes to call. Seems to me that shows he’s fond enough of
her to mean business. As for her, college is all nonsense for a girl
like that. She hasn’t sense enough to take it in. She’d better be at
work or helping her mother, or making a home of her own. She’ll always
be silly and rattle-pated and provoking to sensible people, as long as
she lives. I’ve told her so--I mean I’ve advised her not to struggle
along here through the whole course.”

Betty sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Not every girl is capable of
getting much out of college. Well, anyway, there’s always the Thorn
to congratulate ourselves on. She’s really turning out to be a very
pleasant, helpful person to have in the house.”

Mrs. Post nodded. “She’s your triumph, and Esther Bond is mine. She
says she’s been happier down in this room talking to me about my three
girls and the weather and the price of eggs and the way the laundry
tears our linen than she’s been before in her whole life. I wish I
could make her see that if she enjoys being friends with a stupid old
lady like me, she’d enjoy ten times more being intimate with girls of
her own age. She doesn’t dispute me. She just smiles that terribly
tragic smile of hers, shakes her head, and changes the subject.”

“Do you suppose some one has hurt her feelings?” asked Betty. “Or is
she just naturally secretive and reserved?”

“She’s naturally very confiding,” declared Mrs. Post. “Seems as if she
was friends with everybody in the village where she lived when she was
little. Something’s happened, and it’s happened since she came here, I
think. But whatever it is she’s bound nobody shall ever know about it.
And when she makes up her mind she makes it up hard and to stay.”

“I wonder if the ghost noises have stopped, or if the Thorn has just
suppressed the reports?” Betty queried. “I never quite understood why
the Mystery didn’t complain the day they nearly battered down her door.”

“She’s never even mentioned it to me,” Mrs. Post declared. “She seems
to hate to talk about anything connected with her college life. She
acts smart enough. She doesn’t have any trouble keeping up with her
classes, does she?”

Betty shook her head. “She’s very good in most things--I asked Miss
Ferris about her--only she never answers except when she’s asked
directly, and then she says just as little as she can. Miss Raymond
had her over one day this winter to tell her that her themes were very
promising, only they stopped just when the reader was beginning to
be interested. But Miss Bond said she always wrote down all that she
thought of on each subject, and she acted so frightened and unhappy
that Miss Raymond let her go home and hasn’t tried to encourage her
since. It must be dreadful to be so shy that every one thinks you’re
offish, and even the faculty don’t dare to pursue their efforts to
help you along. Just think, Mrs. Post! She might be one of the leading
writers in her class, if she’d only let Miss Raymond take an interest
in her work. Couldn’t you talk to her about it? I’m sure she’d enjoy
the recognition, and perhaps when she felt that she had a position of
her own in the college she’d be willing to come out of her shell and
make friends.”

“I’ll try to lead up to it some way,” Mrs. Post promised warily. “She
never wants to talk about college affairs, you see.”

A night or two later Betty was awakened out of a sound sleep by one
of the Twin Digs, who stood over her with a candle, explaining in a
sepulchral whisper, “There’s a girl in a fire-escape dangling outside
my window.”

Betty rubbed her eyes, sat up, and, having thus assured herself that
she was not dreaming nonsense, asked the Dig what she meant.

“Why, there’s a girl in a fire-escape dangling outside my window,”
repeated the Dig hopelessly. “You know the new rope fire-escapes that
are in all our rooms? Well, she evidently got into one up on the fourth
floor, and started to slide to the ground, and somehow it’s stuck
with her half-way down. I mean the part you put over your shoulders,
that’s on a pulley to slide down the rope, has stuck and won’t slide. I
couldn’t possibly pull her in alone, and I thought I’d better call you.”

“Yes, of course.” Betty jumped out of bed, and followed her incoherent
informant up-stairs to a third floor single. The window was wide open
and, sure enough, just out of reach, a girl, clearly visible in the
moonlight, hung in mid-air, clinging to a dangling rope. When she saw
the two figures appear in the lighted window, instead of calling to
them or asking help or advice, she threw her whole weight on the rope
and gave one furious jerk. The pulley suddenly began to work again and,
caught unprepared, she lost her hold on the rope. It slipped swiftly
through her fingers and she was carried downward at a terrific rate,
landing with a thud on the rose bed under the window.

Betty and the Dig had watched her descent in helpless horror. Now Betty
seized the candle and raced down-stairs and out into the cold night,
the Dig automatically following. Round to the back of the house they
went, both expecting to find a senseless body, bruised and bleeding, on
the ground. Instead a girl was walking rather stiffly out from among
the burlap-swathed rose-bushes.

“I’m not hurt,” she called softly. “You’ll catch cold. Run back to your
beds, please, and don’t mind me.”

Betty paused in amazement, and suddenly realizing that it was indeed
bitterly cold for kimonos and Turkish slippers over bare feet she
thrust the candle, which the moonlight rendered useless, into the Dig’s
hands, and ordered her back into the house.

“I’ll come and see you later,” she explained. “Take the catch off the
door for me. I want to be sure she really isn’t hurt, and----”

Betty hurried off. It wasn’t necessary to explain to the Dig how
college discipline demanded that she discover the identity of the
girl, and her reasons for making an exit from Morton Hall in so
unconventional a fashion.

The girl was limping down the road toward the Belden House. “Wait!”
Betty called, running after her. “It’s Miss Wales. I must speak to you
a minute.”

The girl paused, glanced around as if counting the chances of escape,
and waited.

“Aren’t you hurt?” Betty demanded as she came closer. “We thought the
fall would surely stun you. Your hands must be terribly cut.”

“Oh, not much,” the girl answered, putting them resolutely behind
her. “I had on gloves. And there was a little snow on the ground
close to the house, to break the fall. You want to know who I am,
Miss Wales, and what I was doing in the Morton so late. Well, it’s
all very simple. I’m Helena Mason. I was up talking to Esther Bond
and we got interested and didn’t hear either of the bells. I hated
to bother any one to let me out, so I told Esther I’d slide down the
fire-escape--it’s good practice for a fire. And because it stuck for a
minute some silly girl imagined I needed help and called you. I’m sorry
you were disturbed. The night-watchman will be along soon--if I can’t
make some girl hear me right away and let me in. Won’t you please go
back now?”

Betty was shivering with cold. “Yes, and you must come with me,” she
said. “You limp dreadfully. Waiting out in the cold after a fall like
that would be positively dangerous. The girl who rooms next to me is
away, and you can go to bed there.”

“But I’d much rather go home,” Helena demurred. “I won’t have to wait
but a minute, and I’m not at all cold.”

“You’re shivering this minute,” Betty told her, “and your hands are cut
so that they’re bleeding on to the ground. You must come and let me fix
them for you.” And putting her arm through Helena’s she hurried her
back to Morton Hall.

Helena submitted in silence while Betty bathed and bandaged the torn
hands, and helped her to undress.

“Now shall I tell Esther to come and say good-night?” she asked. “I’m
going to tell the girl who discovered you that you’re really all
right--we couldn’t believe our eyes when you got up and walked off--and
I’ll go on up and tell Esther too. She must have seen you fall and
she’ll be worrying.”

“Oh, no, she didn’t,” Helena assured her. “Please don’t disturb her,
Miss Wales. I’m sure she’s sound asleep. And Miss Wales--will you have
to tell the other girl--the one who saw me--who I am? I’d so much
rather not. People will laugh at me so.”

“You ought to be thankful they haven’t got to mourn for you,” laughed
Betty. “I can’t see how you escaped being badly hurt. Well, I won’t
mention any name then, Miss Mason; only in return you must promise me
never to go out of our house by such a dangerous route again.”

“I won’t,” agreed the girl. “You see I didn’t know you or Mrs. Post,
and I thought you might be awfully cross at my having stayed after
ten.”

“But Esther knew us,” Betty protested. “She oughtn’t to have let you
try such a thing in the dark and cold unless there was a real necessity
for it.”

“She had nothing to say about it, Miss Wales,” explained Helena coldly.
“I’ve often--I’m not a bit afraid of a fire-escape, and I just said so
and went ahead. She had nothing to do with it at all.”

The Dig was awake and waiting for Betty. She listened eagerly to the
scant news that was vouchsafed her, and pointedly did not inquire
Helena’s name.

“She knows who it was,” Betty guessed shrewdly.

“Let’s not say anything about it,” she suggested aloud. “It might
frighten the girls about trying the new fire-escapes, and it will make
this particular girl seem very absurd.”

“All right,” agreed the Dig briskly. “But such things always do get
out, Miss Wales. Other people must have seen her hanging there or heard
her fall and then the talking afterward.”

Betty crept up to the fourth floor, and knocked very softly on Esther
Bond’s door. Instantly the door was unlocked, and Esther demanded
nervously what the matter was.

“Nothing at all,” Betty quieted her, “but I thought you might know that
Helena got carried down too fast on her fire-escape, so I came to tell
you that she’s all right, only bruised a little and her hands are cut.”

“No, I didn’t know she fell,” said Esther apathetically, “but I heard
you talking to her, and wondered why you had gone out after her. I’m
glad she’s not hurt.”

“Next time you mustn’t let her try such a thing,” Betty told her
gravely. “Call me and I’ll let out anybody who has stayed too late by
mistake.”

“It wasn’t a mistake, Miss Wales,” Esther explained calmly. “Helena
wasn’t ready to go at ten, so she stayed; that’s all. She comes here
when she likes and goes when she likes, and as she likes. If you’re
blaming me for this you don’t know Helena Mason.”

Helena insisted upon leaving before breakfast the next morning. Her
hands were sore, and she was stiff and bruised all over, but she
managed to dress without help, and insisted that she was well enough
to get her books and go to her classes. At noon she was back again,
nervously inquiring for Betty.

“I lost a paper last night, Miss Wales,” she explained. “I had tucked
it into my ulster pocket. Did you pick it up, or has anybody in this
house found it and brought it to you or Mrs. Post?”

Betty had not seen the paper, but she promised to inquire. The Thorn,
it developed, had found it that morning and given it to Esther Bond.

“It was in her writing,” she explained. “It was a Lit. paper, and a
dandy one too. I read it. Wish I’d seen it before I handed mine in.”
She grinned cheerfully. “I can say that to you, Miss Wales, because you
can tell a joke when you see one. Helena Mason can’t. Rather than be
laughed at for her fire-escape escapade she’s given the impression that
she burned her hands with her student lamp. And the people who know
what really happened are smiling a little and wondering a lot.”

A week later the Thorn came to Betty again, her eyes round with
amazement. “I’m not a gossip, Miss Wales,” she began, “but that
paper--the one in Esther Bond’s writing that Miss Mason lost and I
found--was read to-day in Lit. 6, as the best one handed in. And it
was signed by Helena Mason. I wish now that I hadn’t read it. I never
thought there was any harm in reading a theme that you happened to pick
up.”

“There’s a lot of harm in jumping to conclusions,” Betty warned her
hastily. “Helena’s writing may be so like Esther’s that it deceived
you, or Esther may have copied Helena’s paper for her. That’s the right
explanation, I’m sure. A good many girls hire their papers copied, you
know.”

The Thorn sighed and stared at Betty admiringly. “And I never saw any
possibility except that Helena Mason had hired her theme written. I
must have a horrid, suspicious mind, I suppose, Miss Wales. I’m glad
I came right to you first, and I shan’t mention the matter to any one
else.”




CHAPTER XVII

THE MYSTERY SOLVED


MRS. POST had the grippe. “Why couldn’t I have waited until the spring
vacation?” she sighed forlornly. “Then this house would be empty, and
my daughter--the one who’s a nurse--was coming up anyway to visit me.
And now I’m bothering everybody and making lots of extra trouble.”

Betty reassured her tactfully. “It’s not the busy season for Student’s
Aid secretaries,” she said. “Whatever of your work I specially don’t
like, I shall saddle on some girl. They’re all crazy to do things for
you. It’s worth being ill once in a while to see how much people think
of you.”

Late that afternoon Betty remembered that she had forgotten to
distribute towels on the fourth floor, and went up to see about it. The
Mystery’s door was open, she noticed, and a group of fourth floor girls
were inside, eagerly admiring a dress that had just come to the Thorn
from home.

Betty threw them a merry word of greeting and went on to the linen
closet. It was a cloudy afternoon and the tiny high window let in
very little light. “I must write to Jim to complain of his dark
linen-presses,” she thought, with a smile. And then, reaching out her
hand to draw the curtain away from some shelves, she jumped back with
a scream of terror. Her hand had hit the head of somebody who was
crouched in a heap behind the curtains. Betty’s cry brought half a
dozen girls on the run to the linen-closet door.

“It’s nothing,” Betty told them, clinging to the door-post to steady
herself, for she was trembling with fright. “That is--now, girls,
don’t scream or faint or do anything foolish. Some one had hidden in
there--some girl in the house, perhaps, for fun. Whoever it is won’t
hurt us here all together in broad daylight. Now come out, please,”
called Betty, raising her voice and looking hard at the curtains.

There was a moment of awful stillness and then a tall girl straightened
to her full height behind the quivering curtains and came forward,
flushing hotly, to the door. It was Helena Mason. She paid no
attention to Betty and the girls about her but, looking over their
heads, faced Esther Bond, who stood watching the scene with a curious
air of detachment from the door of her room. And the look that Helena
Mason gave her said as plainly as words could have done, “I hate you. I
hate you. I hate you.”

But the look the Mystery sent back said, “I am beyond hating you or any
one else.”

There was a long silence. Betty and the girls with her were too amazed
to speak, and Helena Mason stood quietly defiant, as if daring any one
to question her. At last the Thorn, gay in her new dress, broke the
tension.

“Come on down to my room, girls, and finish your inspection of me
there,” she suggested. “Miss Wales doesn’t need any more protection.
We’re just in the way here now.”

They caught her point instantly, and trooped after her down-stairs,
leaving Betty, Helena, and the Mystery to settle the matter as best
they might. When they had gone Helena laughed a strained little laugh
and began to explain herself.

“You’re always catching me in absurd situations, Miss Wales. But this
can be explained as easily as the fire-escape affair. I’m sure you know
I wasn’t trying to steal your sheets and towels. I had a reason for not
wanting the girls in the house to know I was in Esther’s room to-day,
so when I came up-stairs and found some of them with her, I slipped in
here to wait till they’d gone; and you came and found me. That’s all.”

Betty had been thinking fast. “But the door was locked, Miss Mason--it
is kept locked. How did you manage to get in and then lock it again?”

Helena flushed. “The key to any of these doors will unlock any other,
Miss Wales.”

“But where did you get such a key?” Betty persisted. “How did you
happen to have one ready to-day?”

“I took it out of one of the doors over there.” Helena pointed vaguely
toward a cluster of empty rooms.

“Where is it now?” Betty demanded.

Helena flushed redder than ever. “I’m sure I don’t know--on the floor
in there, probably.”

Betty got a match and began groping around on the floor of the linen
room. But after a minute Esther Bond, who had said nothing so far, came
forward and confronted Helena.

“Why don’t you tell the truth at once?” she asked. “You’ll have to in
the end. Don’t hunt there, Miss Wales. She’s wearing the key on her
watch-chain.”

“Give it to me, please,” Betty said, coming out into the light. She
noticed that Helena took her watch off the chain first, and then
slipped out the key. “So you didn’t take it to-day,” she said.

“I never said when I took it,” Helena flashed back angrily. “I’ve had
it several weeks, if you want to know. The girls in this house are
bores and frightfully curious. Whenever I don’t want to see them and
have them fussing around, why, I come in here and wait till Esther is
alone. There’s no great harm in that, as far as I can see. I’ve done it
all winter.”

Betty was frankly puzzled what to answer. “Why, no--except that you
gave me a dreadful fright just now,” she said slowly. “And--yes, Miss
Mason, there is harm in it. It’s a sly and sneaking way of acting. No
girl would hide in here as you say you have done without a good reason,
and the reason can’t but be discreditable. I don’t ask you to tell me
what it is, but I do ask you and Esther to talk it over and think what
you ought to do about it. And if you want any advice from me or Mrs.
Post, when she’s better, or want to tell us anything in justice to
yourselves or the house, why, we shall be only too glad to help.”

Betty gathered up her towels and departed, hoping she had said the
right thing and devoutly wishing, as she caught a glimpse of herself
in a mirror, that she looked older and more impressive, the better to
emphasize her good advice. Half-way down the stairs she halted. “Why,
she’s the ghost!” she said to herself. “I’ve caught our ghost! How
queer that I never thought of that till now. And I’m afraid that in
this case the Thorn is right about the connection between ghosts and
somebody’s wrong-doing. Either Helena Mason is crazy, or she’s hiding
something that she’s ashamed of. I wish Esther would tell Mrs. Post
all about it. It’s so queer that it worries me.”

A few minutes later there was a knock on Betty’s door. The Mystery, a
strained, frightened look in her big eyes, stood outside.

“I’ve come to explain myself,” she said. “You’ve been very kind, and
Mrs. Post--I couldn’t bear to have her know this, Miss Wales. But I owe
it to you that you should understand, and then I want you to advise me.
Helena wouldn’t come. She has decided what to do, she says--she will
leave college at the spring recess. I am as bad as she in a way, and
perhaps I ought to leave too. Indeed, I may have to.”

“Begin at the beginning and tell me about it,” urged Betty.

The Mystery nodded. “It began when we were little girls. She and her
mother used to spend the summers in our village. Her mother took a
fancy to me. She used to tell us that if Helena had my brains or I
Helena’s face she should have an ideal daughter. She’s very ambitious.
She was always pushing Helena along in her schools--bringing down
tutors in the summer to teach her languages and coach her in her
theme-work. She let me study with them, too, because she thought my
work would inspire Helena. Helena hates to study, and hasn’t much head
for it. Her mother had set her heart on her coming to Harding and
making a name for herself here. When she heard that I wanted dreadfully
to come, she sent for me and offered to pay my expenses if I would help
Helena, especially in theme-work.

“I never thought how it would be--it sounded all right--like tutoring.
So I promised. Helena insisted that I should live off at the end of
nowhere, so she could come to me without any one’s finding it out. I
soon saw what she wanted of me--not tutoring, but help. I was to write
all her papers, take all her notes and read them to her,--do all her
work and see that she got the credit. At the end of last year I got
tired of it, and I thought I could pay my own way. But when I spoke to
Helena she said she would tell the whole story, and that it would look
as black for me as for her. ‘Only I shall go home where no one knows
or cares,’ she said, ‘except mother, who can’t defend her plan, and
you will stay here--or you’ll stop and teach and never get a decent
position, because they won’t recommend a cheat.’ So I’ve kept on. When
you asked me to come and live here Helena was furious. She said she
couldn’t come to see me here without being seen--of course things have
leaked out, and she’s been suspected of getting help, but nothing has
ever been proved. I wouldn’t give in--I wanted so to come.

“But I did arrange to have a room away from the others, and I’ve kept
the door locked so they wouldn’t come in suddenly and find her here
or see a paper I’d written for her to hand in. She gets stupider and
lazier all the time, I think. She can’t do the simplest thing for
herself now. She had an absurd story ready to explain all this. I
told her I wouldn’t help her with it. I’m sick of being the brains of
Helena Mason. I want to be myself--to have the use of my own ideas and
abilities. I’m tired of selling my brains and my self-respect for a
college education that other girls earn easily with their hands. It
wasn’t a fair bargain. Of course I shall pay back the money as soon
as I can. But whether I go or stay, I shall be free from now on to
be myself--not a nonentity sucked dry to help a rich girl get into
Dramatic Club and Philosophical and the Cercle Français, and to make a
reputation for the brains her mother admires. Now you understand me,
Miss Wales. Tell me what to do.”

Betty hesitated. “I’m not sure that I do understand. You mean that
you’ve actually written all Helena Mason’s papers?”

Esther nodded. “Ready for her to copy. At first I only corrected
hers, but for nearly two years I’ve written them outright. And I’ve
studied nearly every lesson for her--taken all the notes for us both,
and recited as little as possible myself, so the resemblances in our
work shouldn’t be noticed. Now I shall come forward and take part in
things. Oh, it will be splendid, Miss Wales!” She paused uncertainly.
“But perhaps you think I’ve been too dishonest to deserve a loan from
the Student’s Aid, or any chance of earning money. If I’d only known,
before I came, that there were plenty of chances! I didn’t realize
it even after I came, when Helena first proposed my doing the things
that seemed to me unfair. I did them because I hated to quarrel with
her--and after I’d done them she held them over me. She’s not as mean
as she seems, Miss Wales. Her mother has brought her up to feel that
appearances are the only thing that count.”

The cloak of diffidence and reserve had fallen away from the girl. She
could speak for herself and for her friend in eloquent defense. Betty
watched and listened, amazed at the sudden change in her. She was free
at last to be herself.

“No,” Betty said at last, “I don’t think you have forfeited your
chance. Mrs. Mason was most to blame, in suggesting the plan and not
then seeing that her daughter did her own work. Helena shall have
another chance too, if I can arrange it for her and she will take it;
but it will probably mean explaining to her teachers how her work has
been done so far. With you”--Betty considered--“I don’t see why you
shouldn’t let them explain the change in you to suit themselves. You’ll
be a great mystery to them”--Betty smiled at her. “We’ve called you
that--the Mystery--Mrs. Post and I, when we’ve talked about you. I’m
glad our Mystery is solved at last. You haven’t seemed quite real to me
up in your lonely tower room.”

“Haunted by ghosts,” added Esther, with a sad smile. “I know what the
girls have thought, you see. I couldn’t say anything. Now I suppose
there’ll be more stories, especially if Helena leaves college.”

But the Thorn had arranged that. “I’ve told the girls that loyalty to
you means silence, Miss Wales,” she explained to Betty. “I proved to
them how dangerous it is to guess about queer things like that, and
they’ve all promised not to say a word about anything they saw. Of
course”--the Thorn couldn’t resist so fine a chance to plume herself on
her superiority--“finding that paper and the fire-escape business and
Miss Mason’s story about it can’t help giving me some very interesting
suspicions, but they shall never pass my lips.”

Next Betty went to see Helena, prepared to offer to help her through
her crisis; but Helena had made her plans and was determined to abide
by them.

“I couldn’t stay on, Miss Wales,” she said, “and I certainly don’t
want to. I’ve had a good time here, laughing in my sleeve at the people
I’ve taken in with my clever stories, and pretty verses--why, the one
to Agatha Dwight actually made a splash that rippled away down to New
York. The funny thing about it is that the stories and all are like me.
Mother attracts fascinating, out-of-the-way people, and we’ve always
lived among them in an atmosphere of unusual, fascinating happenings.
How in the world that little country girl gets hold of it is a mystery
to me. She’s never seen such people, or been to their dinners or behind
the scenes at their plays. I’ve never even told her much.”

“That’s the mystery of genius,” said Betty, who had thought a great
deal about Esther Bond. “You never can explain it.”

“And if you haven’t got it,” said Helena hopelessly, “you can’t get
it. I’m not unusual. I shall never shine except in mother’s reflected
glory. I’m sorry for mother; she’s wasted so much time and money trying
to make me seem clever. Now she’s got to get used to having a perfectly
commonplace daughter. I shall do my best to make her like the real me,
but at any rate she’ll have to endure me as I am. I shan’t permit any
more efforts at veneering me. They’re too demoralizing.”

So Helena departed at Easter, amid the laments of her class. She would
have been editor-in-chief of the “Argus” and Ivy Orator if she had
stayed, they told her.

“I’ve willed my honors to the undiscovered geniuses,” she retorted
daringly. “I’m tired of being called the cleverest girl in the class.
I’m going home to give the rest of you a chance. College never exactly
suited my style.”

Heartless, mocking, careless of what she had stolen, even unconscious
of what she was restoring to the girl in the tower room, Helena left
Harding, and no more ghosts disturbed the peace of Morton Hall.

One day just before the winter term closed, Eugenia stopped in to see
Betty on her way home from Miss Dick’s.

“Something’s the matter with Dorothy,” she said. “I came back early,
so you would have time to run over and see her before she goes to bed.
She seems to be dreadfully disturbed about something and homesick and
unhappy. She kept saying that nothing was the matter, but the tears
would come creeping out. I don’t think she’s sick--just unhappy.”

“I’ll ask Miss Dick to let her come and stay with me to-night,” Betty
suggested, slipping on an ulster.

Dorothy flew into her big sister’s arms, and fairly danced for joy when
she was told that Betty had come to take her home.

“Have things been going criss-cross with you lately?” Betty asked her,
as they ran back, hand in hand, to Morton Hall.

“Yes,” whispered Dorothy solemnly, “they have. Do you happen to feel
like a reckless ritherum to-night, Betty dear?”

“Not especially to-night,” laughed Betty. “Do you?”

The Smallest Sister sighed profoundly. “Yes. I guess I shan’t ever stop
feeling so as long as I live.”

“Not even if we should make hot chocolate in a chafing-dish?”

“That would be splendid,” Dorothy admitted eagerly, “but, Betty dear,
it wouldn’t make you feel the same about a person who’d pretended to
be very fond of you and all the same she did a mean hateful thing,
would it now?”

Betty admitted that hot chocolate might not be able to wipe out all
the sting of false friendship. “But maybe the person didn’t mean to be
mean,” she suggested hopefully.

Dorothy’s little face was very sober. “I’m sure she didn’t know how sad
it would seem to me,” she explained. “Betty, let’s play I was mistaken,
and enjoy our hot chocolate as much as ever we can.”

But when it came time to put out the light, Dorothy pleaded that it
should be left burning “just a teeny, weeny speck, like a night-lamp.”

“What’s the matter, Dottie?” objected Betty. “Have you been seeing
ghosts again?”

“Whatever made you think of that?” asked Dorothy anxiously. “I never
said a single word about ghosts. Besides, I couldn’t see her again,
because I didn’t see her before--I only heard her.”

“Well, you won’t see or hear any ghosts here,” Betty assured her,
turning out the light. “When I’m around they all vanish, and real
people come in their places. So you can go to sleep this minute, and
sleep as sound as ever you can.”

An hour or two later Betty, who had given her bed to Dorothy, and
was curled up on the box-couch, was awakened by the shrill sound of
a little voice pleading piteously. It was Dorothy, fast asleep but
sitting bolt upright in bed and talking in a strained, perfectly
intelligible monotone.

“Oh, please don’t, Frisky, please don’t!” she moaned. “I want to scream
so, and I know I mustn’t. You look terrible in that white dress. Take
down your hands, please, Frisky, please! I know it’s you, so why do
you go on pretending? I never meant to tell Betty about your having
the candle-shade. You said you’d forgive me. But you said you forgave
Shirley, and then you frightened her so that she’ll never get over it.
Oh, I mustn’t scream or they’ll find you out! Please, please go away,
Frisky, and don’t try to frighten me any more.”

The tears were streaming down the Smallest Sister’s face, and she
seemed to be in mortal terror. Betty went to her and shook her softly
awake, soothing her with pet names and caresses. And then, between
sobs, the whole story came out.

“Oh, Betty, you must never, never tell, but Frisky was the ghost!
I made her mad at me because I said she oughtn’t to have taken a
candle-shade from the Tally-ho the night you asked us two to dinner.
I saw it in her drawer the other day, and I said she ought to give it
right back. And then she told me I was a meddlesome little thing. But
when I most cried she said she’d make up and forgive me. But last night
when my two roommates were away, there was a knocking near the chimney
and a moan, and a ghost came right out of the wall, just as Shirley
said, with its hands up to its face, and it was Frisky in a white
sheet.”

“Well, then you needn’t have been scared any more,” said Betty
soothingly.

“A person in a white sheet is rather scaring,” declared Dorothy,
“especially if you’re awfully scared to begin with. She glided around
and around, and she wouldn’t speak to me when I whispered to her that
I knew her. So then I shivered and shook till morning. She might have
scared me just as she did Shirley--she couldn’t tell. Shirley will
stutter and her eyes will twitch always, the doctor says. But Frisky
called me her funny little chum to-day, and just laughed when I accused
her of being the ghost. And I can’t quarrel without telling why, and if
I tell, something perfectly dreadful will happen to Frisky.”

“She well deserves it for frightening and tyrannizing over you little
girls,” said Betty severely.

“Oh, Betty, you mustn’t tell! You promised not to. Only always let me
come and stay with you when my roommates are away.”

“You certainly shall,” Betty promised, “and do hurry and get ready for
college, Dottie. Boarding-school girls are such complete sillies!”




CHAPTER XVIII

FRISKY FENTON’S FOLLY


MR. THAYER’S May party was to be a Doll Festival. Georgia had thought
of it, and she and Fluffy Dutton had made sure that the college was
“properly excited” over its “features.”

“No use taking the darling dolls home,” Georgia declared. “The new
climate wouldn’t agree with them. No use packing them away in messy
boxes, with books and pillows and pictures. By next fall the doll fever
will be over.

“There can be doll dances in costume, and a doll play, if Madeline
isn’t too famous to write one. The May-pole dancers can be dressed like
dolls too.”

Fluffy sighed and interrupted: “Shan’t you mind at all parting with
Wooden?”

“Not a bit,” returned Georgia, the matter-of-fact. “Let’s get a paper
ready for the girls to sign, with the number of dolls they can furnish
opposite their names.”

Straight signed for one doll without a murmur of protest, but it was
not Rosa Marie that she put on the pile in Georgia’s borrowed express
cart on the day of the May party. Not even to her beloved Fluffy did
she confide her intention of never, never parting from her dear Rosa
Marie.

The party was on the factory lawn, and the college part of it
overflowed hungrily into the Tally-ho’s territory, or climbed up to
view the animated scene comfortably from the Peter Pan’s upper stories.
The doll dances and May dances came first, and then everybody gathered
around the pile of dolls that rose like a haystack on the slope of the
hill, while Babbie led the little girls one by one, beginning with
the smallest and most forlorn and ragged, up to the pile to choose a
doll. Georgia strutted like a peacock because Wooden was the very first
one selected, and Fluffy refused to be comforted when the fat little
Polander who had chosen her Esquimaux promptly sat down on it and
cracked its skull.

“Never mind, dearie,” Straight consoled her. “Having dolls to smash
is part of the fun of having them at all. Mr. Thayer will glue it
together, and that child will never think about the crack.”

“It’s queer,” gulped Fluffy, “how fond you get of everything you have
up here at college--your friends and your room, and even your footless
little toys.”

“Because they’re the very last toys we’ll ever, ever have,” said
Straight soberly. “Why didn’t you keep the Esquimaux, if you cared so
much?”

“Because I kept the Baby and its nurse,” explained Fluffy shamefacedly.
Whereupon Straight confessed to having bought a substitute for Rosa
Marie, and the twins departed to the Tally-ho to celebrate their
perfect harmony of spirit in cooling glasses of lemonade.

Betty was catering for the party, acting as special reception committee
for all the shy and friendless factory hands, and finding time between
to consult flitting members of the “Proper Excitement” and “Proper
Encouragement” committees. Money-making summers must be arranged for
some of the Morton Hall girls, and positions assured for many needy
seniors. Betty had started a Harding teacher’s agency, and already the
demands upon it were almost greater than the supply.

“But I don’t intend they shall teach unless they really want to,” Betty
decreed, “and not unless they’re at least a little fitted to. Teaching
isn’t the only way for earning money--look at the Tally-ho. Mr. Morton
wants a private secretary if I can honestly recommend one. He’s been
telling his friends about my ideas of fitting people to positions,
and I got the funniest letter from one of them--a very distinguished
author. She said the woman question would soon be settled if I kept
on insisting that a woman’s work should be her true vocation. Best of
all, she wants a manager for a lace shop she is interested in, and
a chaperon for her two daughters who are to study art in Paris next
winter. Those are two splendid openings.”

“There are a lot of dolls left,” Babbie announced, having finished
her distribution. “I think Bob would like them sent to New York for
her floating hospitals and playgrounds. Where shall we put them? I’m
afraid it’s going to rain.”

“In the Tally-ho workroom,” Betty decided rapidly. “It does look like
rain. Then we’d better have the ice-cream and cakes in the club-house.
Where’s Nora? Babbie, could you ask Mr. Thayer to tell them all to go
to the club-house? Why will it always pour on garden parties?”

She had just found Nora, sent her to give new orders to the men who
were carrying the ice-cream, made sure that Bridget had taken all
the cakes over, and started across the lawn herself, when the storm
broke--a pelting spring shower that sent her scurrying back to the
deserted Tally-ho in search of an umbrella and rubbers. Before she had
found them, a forlorn, dripping little figure fell upon her.

“Oh, Betty dear,” cried the Smallest Sister, “I went to the party to
find you--Mr. Thayer asked me to come, but I only went to find you.
And I didn’t like to climb the fence, as long as it was a party, so I
came all the way around, and I’m soaked. Betty, something awful has
happened. Frisky has run away.”

Betty stared in dismay. “Dorothy, I haven’t a minute to spare now. Take
Emily’s umbrella and hurry home and get off those wet things. I’ll come
to see you to-night, but I can’t possibly stop now--nothing will go
right if I’m not there.”

“About the ice-cream, you mean?” demanded Dorothy. “To-night will be
too late to do anything about Frisky.”

“But, dearie,” Betty told her, “I can’t do anything about Frisky. If
she’s run away from Miss Dick’s school, why, Miss Dick is the one to
attend to it.”

“Miss Dick doesn’t know.”

“Then why not tell her instead of me?”

“Because,” said Dorothy simply, “you always know what to do. Miss Dick
and Kittie Carson wouldn’t know. They’d never find her and never get
her to come back. Isn’t it very awful indeed to run away and be an
actress, Betty?”

Betty laid down her umbrella, wrapped her coat around Dorothy,
and with one anxious glance in the direction of the supper that
she was relentlessly abandoning bent her energies to settling her
responsibilities toward Frisky Fenton.

“Does any one else know where Frisky has gone?” she asked.

“I think maybe her roommates do. She came and told me this morning,
and gave me a blue ribbon for a keepsake. She said she couldn’t bear to
go without any good-byes to her chums. She said, ‘Don’t tell any one,’
but of course she didn’t mean you. She knows I tell you everything
since----”

“And where has she gone?”

“To the Junction, to join that company that was acting here all last
week. They’re going ’way out west after to-night. That’s why you must
hurry.”

“Why on earth did she do that, Dottie?”

“’Cause her stepmother was so unsympathetic,” explained Dorothy, “at
Easter vacation, you know, about a new hat, and a party, and going
to see Miss Dwight in Miss Madeline’s play. And yesterday Miss Dick
scolded her and kept her in to write French verbs. So she just decided
to go off and be an actress.”

“And why do you think I can get her to come back?”

“’Cause she said once she’d love to have a sympathetic sister like you.
You understand exactly how girls feel.”

Betty sighed.

“Besides,” Dorothy went on, “you know an actress. Frisky knows
three--Miss Dwight and the ones that are the hero and heroine in this
company. She went to a play they acted here one afternoon called ‘East
Lynne,’ and she waited outside by the back door and met them, and they
encouraged her.”

“But, Dorothy, I thought you weren’t intimate with Frisky any more
since you found out she was the ghost.”

“We never stopped being chums,” said Dorothy, bursting into a sudden
flood of tears. “I’m sure she’ll be sick of being by herself by
to-night, and scared, and I almost think she’d expect me to send you
after her.”

Betty looked at her watch. It was nearly six. The next train to the
Junction would be the theatre express. “All right, little sister, I’ll
go,” she said cheerfully. “Only I can’t take the whole responsibility.
You must let me send a note to Miss Dick.”

So Betty wrote Miss Dick that Francisca Fenton had gone to the Junction
alone on a foolish errand, that she was going after her on the theatre
train, and that if Miss Dick wished to come too they could go together.
“But I’m quite sure I can manage alone,” she added, “and perhaps she
would feel less humiliated at having me find her.”

And as Miss Dick didn’t appear at the train, it was to be presumed that
she shared the general faith in Betty Wales.

As she sped to the station Betty noted the name of the company--“Pratt
Players”--on a dilapidated bill-board, and on the train she planned out
her campaign. She would drive to the place where they were playing,
and if Frisky was there or they knew where she was, all would be plain
sailing. If not, the police and private detectives must be put to work,
under pledges of secrecy. She couldn’t see that Miss Dick would be
needed, no matter which way things went.

But she had no sooner arrived at the Junction than her plans were
suddenly thrown all awry. None of the station officials, none of the
cabmen at the corner, knew anything about the Pratt Players.

“‘The Pink Moon’ at the Lyric, Shakespeare at the Grand, and I’m not
sure about the Paxton,” the man at the information bureau told her
glibly.

[Illustration: “WE’LL FIND ’EM, MISS,” HE ASSURED HER]

A cabman remembered that the Paxton was closed. “But ‘The Pink Moon’
is a great show, ma’am,” he assured Betty. “Drive you there for fifty
cents.”

Betty sped back to the information bureau. “Pratt Players?” repeated
the man inside. “Pratt Players? Some ten-twenty-thirty outfit, I
s’pose, doing a week at some little nickel theatre or music hall.
City’s full of them, miss.--Next train to Boston leaves in twenty
minutes.--Lunch-room down-stairs, ma’am.--Where in South Dakota did you
say you want to go?”

Betty turned away sick at heart. She had a vision of herself being
driven aimlessly from one nickel theatre to another, in a vain search
for the Pratt Players, while Frisky----If only Miss Dick were here! She
might telegraph for her. But first she pocketed pride and discretion
and consulted the friendly cabman again. He had never heard of the
Pratt Players. “But we’ll find ’em, miss,” he assured her, “if it takes
all night. Got a friend in the company, miss?”

Betty turned away with much dignity toward the telegraph office. On the
way she tried to think what 19-- girls had lived at the Junction. If
only she could remember one she knew well enough to take with her on
her quixotic search! There was a sudden press of people coming in from
a newly arrived train. Betty stood aside forlornly to let them pass,
when she felt her hand caught in a strong clasp and looked up to find
Jim Watson towering over her.

“By all the luck!” he cried. “You here and alone! Come on to the
theatre with me, Betty. Faculty don’t have to be chaperoned, even if
accompanied by a dimple, do they? I was hoping to get up to Harding in
time to call on you--got to be in Albany to-morrow on business for the
firm. I say, Betty, how long is it since I’ve seen you?”

Betty didn’t wait to answer. “Come,” she ordered desperately, “and find
a cab and help me hunt for the Pratt Players. I’ll explain after we’re
started. I don’t know when I’ve been so glad to see somebody I know,
Jim.”

“Look sharp now,” Jim told the cabman. “Extra fare if you hit the right
place early in the game, understand.” Owing to which inducement cabby
wasted but two guesses and halted with a flourish in front of the
dingy theatre occupied by the Pratt Players before the first curtain
had risen on the faded splendors of “East Lynne.”

Jim ordered the cab to wait, tipped a ticket-seller and a messenger boy
to ascertain the name and whereabouts of the heroine, who presumably
had Frisky in charge, escorted Betty down a dark alley to the
stage-door, cautioned her to call if anything went wrong, and leaned
comfortably against a post to await her return from the inner regions.

They had agreed that it would be better for Betty to go in alone; but
she wished, as she opened the door and groped her way up a steep,
narrow flight of stairs, that she had still the protection of Jim’s
unruffled, confident presence. She met two men on the stairs. One
took no notice of her, the other tossed a “Late again, eh? You’ll be
docked,” over his shoulder, and hurried on. At the top of the flight
Betty halted aimlessly. Stage hands were busy moving battered scenery.
A woman’s querulous voice clamored impatiently for “Daisy!” Then above
everything rose a man’s angry remonstrance.

“Promised you nothing! You said you could dance, and you can’t. If you
could, you’re good for a front row job, with that face. Oh, well,” in
answer to a low-voiced reminder, “I never thought you meant it. That
was my little jolly. Don’t you know jolly when you see it, little girl?
Where’ll you stay to-night? Lost all your money? Well, I’m losing
more’n I ever had over this old show. It ain’t my fault that you got
lost this afternoon along with your pocketbook, and didn’t get here
till it was show-time. Anyway I haven’t a thing for you at any hour
of the day. If I was you I’d go right home to my mamma. Here’s two
plunks--that’s all I can spare. So long, little girl.”

Betty stepped forward toward the voice just in time to be run down by a
frightened, tear-stained Frisky, clutching two silver dollars tight in
her hand.

“Miss Wales!” she gasped. “Where did you come from?”

“I’ve got a carriage outside to take you home in,” Betty told her
quietly. “So you won’t need that money. Let’s give it back and then
go.”

At that the manager appeared, looking a little frightened, and
protesting stoutly that he “hadn’t never promised the kid a part.” And
when Betty didn’t offer to dispute him, he seemed much relieved and
grew obsequious and effusive, so that Betty was glad to remember that
Jim was outside. When they finally got out to him, past the bowing,
mincing manager, Jim tactfully fell into the rear of the procession,
and rode back on the box with the driver, so that Frisky, who was
hysterical with humiliation and relief, might have Betty all to herself.

Her story was just as Dorothy had told it. After getting to the
Junction she had experienced the same difficulty that Betty had in
finding the elusive Pratt Players; but not having thought of a cab,
and being without Jim’s effective methods of memory-jogging, she had
walked all the afternoon, losing her pocketbook in the course of
her wanderings, only to be told by one of her “encouraging” actor
friends that he had only suggested her joining the company as a bit of
harmless, pleasant “jolly.”

“I’d saved three months’ allowance, and sold my turquoise ring to
Josephine Briggs for three dollars,” sighed Frisky. “What will Miss
Dick say, Miss Wales, and what will she write home to my father?”

At the station Jim appeared with tickets and the cheering information
that the next train wouldn’t go for half an hour. So Frisky, who had
had a banana for lunch and no dinner, was persuaded to gulp down a
sandwich and a glass of milk, while Betty thanked Jim so fervently that
he took heart and boldly inquired when he might come to Harding to make
the call he had missed in the pursuit of Frisky.

On the train Frisky considered her future and dissolved in floods of
woe.

“I couldn’t stay without my money,” she wailed, “but I simply cannot
go back and face the awful scoldings I shall get. Miss Dick won’t let
me out of the school yard for the rest of the term, and I shouldn’t
wonder if she’d tell the whole story right out in chapel. If I hadn’t
been made to stay by myself so much and think, I shouldn’t have thought
of so many wrong things to do. I discovered the secret passage one day
when I was sent to my room to meditate. Who could resist trying to be
a ghost, Miss Wales, with that secret passage all fixed up as if on
purpose? I’ve felt awfully about Shirley----”

“And yet you did it again,” said Betty sternly, “to Dorothy, who might
have been just as badly frightened.”

Frisky wept afresh. “I know it. She made me cross, and I didn’t care.
Sometimes I don’t care what happens, Miss Wales, and other days I love
everybody, even Miss Dick and my stepmother. The worst thing is that
nobody trusts me. I meant to show them that I could be trusted to get
along all right alone. And then I--I--I--lost my purse,” sobbed Frisky
wildly.

Betty patted her shoulder comfortingly. “That plan was all wrong,”
she said. “Suppose you were to come and consult me about things the
way Dorothy does? I believe we could get to be good friends. I know a
good many stage people,” she added craftily, “the real kind, not the
make-believes like those dreadful ones in the Pratt Company.”

“But if ever I wanted to go on the stage you’d say no, Miss Wales,”
demurred Frisky.

“I should say that Miss Dwight knows more about it than either of us,”
amended Betty. “We are almost at Harding, Frisky. Shall I tell Miss
Dick to-morrow that I’m to be your special consultation committee from
now on, and that I’m willing to be responsible for your good behavior?”

“Responsible for my good behavior?” Frisky giggled, with a touch of her
old irresponsible gaiety. “But I’m always in hot water, Miss Wales. I
try sometimes, and sometimes I don’t, but it always ends the same way.”

“So you’re not to be trusted, then,” began Betty. “I thought you
said----”

“Oh!” Frisky considered it. “If I said I’d try all the time, and Miss
Dick promised to overlook some little mistakes, and I should talk
things over with you instead of with the other girls--I think sometimes
they stir me up on purpose to see the rumpus there will be. Well, then
you’d beg me off with Miss Dick. Is that it?”

“I’d explain to Miss Dick. I’d ask her to treat you as she does the
oldest and most responsible girls--to trust you.”

“She treats them all a good deal like infants,” murmured Frisky. She
turned to Betty. “Thank you, Miss Wales. I don’t know why you should
do so much for me. If you are looking out for my good behavior, I’ll
certainly try not to make you sorry or to get you in a fix with Miss
Dick.” Frisky laughed again.

Betty took the sleepy Francisca home with her, and risked routing
somebody up at Miss Dick’s to make her report. Miss Dick herself
answered her. “I found your note on my return,” she explained. “One
of Miss Fenton’s roommates had grown worried and spoken to me earlier
in the day. Miss Carson and I went down in the afternoon. No, we were
not provided with the company’s name, and we could not place them.
Miss Carson is staying all night--the detective reports to her hourly.
I shall wire her at once, of course. Miss Wales, you have done me an
inestimable service in helping me to fulfil my trust to the child’s
parents. In the morning you will come over? Certainly, Miss Wales.
Anything, anything! I am very deeply in your debt.”

Betty smiled, a little later, over the picture of the dignified Miss
Dick, the subdued Kitty Carson, and a perturbed detective pursuing a
phantom theatrical troupe and a pretty girl through the devious ways of
the Junction.

“But I didn’t find them,” she reflected modestly. “It was Jim. I’m
never the one that does things. It’s just my good luck and my good
friends.”




CHAPTER XIX

ARCHITECT’S FINAL PLANS--CONSIDERED


BETTY WALES danced merrily across the campus to her office. It was
commencement Monday. Betty hadn’t meant to stay over at first, but the
affairs of the teachers’ agency were not quite settled, and they had
kept her. Besides, Lucile Merrifield graduated, Georgia was a junior
usher, Helen was to take her Master’s degree, and 19-- was coming
back “in bunches,” as Bob elegantly phrased it, for an “informal
between-years” reunion. And finally Jim Watson was coming to make his
much-heralded call on this very Monday evening. Betty had taken him
to 19--’s own Glee Club concert, and he had suggested celebrating the
anniversary, much to the disgust of the B. C. A.’s and the rest of the
old 19-- crowd, who found no occasion quite complete unless they could
have Betty Wales in their midst.

Half-way to her office she was hailed by President Wallace. “You’ll be
back next year, of course?” he asked. “The Morton couldn’t do without
you.”

Betty blushed and laughed. “I hoped I could escape without being asked
that, because I don’t know. Mother and father say they are all right,
but I must look them over and be quite sure before I decide to leave
them again.”

“Very well, only be quite sure also that we need you here,” the
President told her, and Betty hurried on, thinking hard about the
next year at Morton Hall. It would certainly be very nice, with the
Mystery explained and happy, Miss Romance departed to make a home for
her devoted suitor, the Digs beginning to appreciate the inherent
reasonableness of obeying rules, the Thorn no longer prickly, and the
Goop boarding with a married sister who had providentially come to live
in Harding.

“I don’t believe her manners are worth the ruin of your disposition and
mine,” Betty had told Mrs. Post, when, in June, the Goop had horrified
the house by appearing at breakfast collarless and with unbuttoned
shoes.

Besides these improvements six seniors were leaving--rather dull,
colorless girls, whose departure would make room for livelier, more
promising material. Betty resolved that Morton Hall should be the
gayest, jolliest house on the campus--if she came back.

Frisky Fenton was at the door of her office to meet her. She had been
sitting on the stairs waiting.

“I’m going home this afternoon, Miss Wales,” she said. “I’ve taken all
my prelims for Harding, and I hope I’ve passed most of them. Since
I’ve been over here so much with you, I simply can’t wait to get into
college. Miss Wales, I’ve come to consult you for one last time. How
shall I make my stepmother love me?”

Betty smiled into Frisky’s melting brown eyes that were fixed upon
her so earnestly. “Didn’t Miss Dwight advise you to puzzle that out
for yourself, if you wanted to learn how to win over crowds of people
later? But I know how I should begin. Call her mother. It almost makes
you love a person to call her that. And if you love her and try to
please her----”

“I’ve thought of another thing to do,” Frisky took her up. “I shall
pretend she’s like you. I’ve noticed that when people expect a great
deal of me--as you do, Miss Wales--I manage to come up to it. Perhaps
if I expect my--mother to be like you--to understand and sympathize----”

“And scold hard too, sometimes,” laughed Betty. “Don’t forget that part
of me.”

The girl whom Betty had picked out as a possible secretary to Jasper J.
Morton opened the door, and Frisky held up her flower-like face to be
kissed and went off, a mist in her eyes at the parting. The prospective
secretary didn’t stay long; if she hadn’t been a born “rusher,” capable
of getting through intricate discussions and momentous decisions in
double-quick time, Betty would never have thought of recommending her.
And then, with not time enough before her next appointment to begin on
anything important, Betty drew out a sheet of paper and began drawing
up rules, à la Madeline.

“If I come back next year,” she headed the page:

  “_Rule One_--All ghosts whatsoever are tabooed.

  _Rule Two_--Boarding-schools need not apply for assistance.

  _Rule Three_--Matrons shall arrive on time and never be ill.

  _Rule Four_--In short, bothers, fusses, complications, mysteries,
  worries, and everything else that makes life----”

Betty paused for an adjective, finally decided upon “interesting,”
and threw down her pen with a little laugh. “That’s exactly it,” she
thought. “Work and bothering and planning are what make life worth
living and bring the big things around your way. Some day Morton Hall
will run itself, as the Tally-ho does. Until then---- Come in, Miss
Smith. Yes, I have heard from that school. Can you get a reference
for Latin? There is one first year class that this teacher may have
to take. You failed in Livy? Oh, I am sorry, Miss Smith! Yes, I
understand; it was when you were a freshman and never dreamed of having
to teach. But the Latin department could hardly recommend you, could
it? Let me see what other places are vacant.”

It was a long, busy morning--a thoroughly grown-up, responsible morning
for the Small Person behind the Big Desk. Once she rushed to her window
to see the Ivy procession wind its snowy, green-garlanded way past,
and again she deserted her post to hear the Ivy Song and to watch the
pretty picture the seniors made as they sang. But neither Babbie’s gay
pleading, Mary Brooks’s mockery, nor Helen’s mournful sympathy could
shake her purpose. She was going to “tend up” to the business in hand,
until it was done. It might be deliciously cool and as gay and amusing
as possible down under the swaying elms. 19-- might be holding an
“experience meeting illustrated with tableaux, blue prints, and babies”
under the Hilton House birch tree.

“I can stand it to miss all that,” Betty confided to Mary Brooks, “but
if the afternoon people don’t come on time and don’t hurry through,
so I can go on our own special picnic, I shall fairly weep on their
shoulders.”

So the last of the “afternoon people”--a leisurely freshman who had
taken ten minutes to decide between two rooms in Morton Hall--was
surprised to see the patient, dignified secretary of the Student’s
Aid dart past her down the stairs, sprint, hatless, her curls flying,
across the campus, and shriek wildly at a passing flat-car, which
slowed up for a minute while a dozen willing hands caught the panting
little secretary and pulled her up and on.

It was a flat-car picnic, in memory of old days. There were
ginger-cookies for Roberta, who ate an unbelievable number of them,
and chocolate éclairs for everybody, because on the sorrowful senior
picnic there had been almost nothing else. This time there was bacon,
sliced very thin, to toast on pointed sticks, rolls, some of Bridget’s
delicious coffee keeping hot in thermos bottles, a huge chocolate cake,
and dozens of little raisin pies--the Tally-ho’s very latest specialty.

“Where is Madeline?” asked Betty, helping to start the fire. She had
spent the trip out in catching her breath, cooling off, and borrowing
hairpins to replace those lost in her flight.

“In the gym basement,” explained Christy, “with Nita and Jean Eastman.
They’re the costume committee for the aftermath parade, you know. They
boasted that they had done themselves proud before they came up here,
but this morning Madeline had a great thought and they’ve been hard at
it all day. They may come out later for supper.”

“We promised to hang out a sign,” Rachel remembered, and borrowed
Helen’s red sweater, which, tied by the sleeves to a sapling down near
the fence, pointed unerringly to the presence of picnickers on the hill.

“If you don’t send Mr. James Watson packing the minute the concert
is out, you’ll miss the sensation of this commencement,” Madeline
warned Betty solemnly when she arrived. There was a smudge of brown
paint across her white linen skirt, and Nita declared feelingly that
she would never make another pair of wings, no, not for any aftermath
parade that ever was. These were the only clues to the extra-special
features that they had planned for the evening.

At seven the returning flat-car halted by the fence, and the revelers
went singing home to dress for the concert.

“Come to the gym basement for your costume,” Nita whispered to Betty
and K. “Find me or Jean. Madeline is as likely as not to forget all
about being there.”

When Jim and Betty reached the campus it was gay with lanterns, and
girls in evening dress and their escorts were everywhere.

“How about a hammock in a quiet spot?” suggested Jim. “The music is
prettiest from a distance, don’t you think?”

Of course, all the hammocks were full long since, but the obliging
Georgia Ames and three other footsore junior ushers politely vacated
theirs, insisting that they were only resting for a minute, and Jim sat
on the ground at Betty’s feet and inquired for her stage-struck friend,
the cheery Mrs. Post, and the Morton Hall-ites, and then for Betty’s
summer schedule.

“I might be in Cleveland,” Jim announced tentatively. “The firm is
working on plans for two houses out there.”

“Then you could come out to the cottage for Sundays,” Betty said
cheerily. “Will would love to take you sailing. I hate to go in those
bobbing little boats, so I stay on shore.”

“I’m not so very keen about sailing, either,” Jim said.

“Then I’m afraid you’d better not come,” Betty told him sweetly.
“Sailing and swimming are positively the only amusements out there.”

“Except talking to you.”

“Oh, I’m the family cook,” Betty explained. “If you think I’m busy
here, you should see me bustle around in summer.”

“I see.” Jim changed the subject. “Is Morton Hall to the queen’s taste
since we fixed the linen rooms?”

“Oh, yes, Jim,” Betty assured him. “It’s a model--any amount nicer than
the other campus houses.”

“Thanks for the firm,” Jim said, and then was quiet so long that Betty
inquired laughingly if he had been to the Bay of the Ploshkin after his
blues.

“Not yet,” he told her. “I’ve felt like it sometimes, but I was afraid
I’d worn out your sympathy. I say, Betty, you’ll write to a fellow once
in a while, won’t you? And if I should come to Cleveland--doesn’t the
family cook get her evenings off?”

“Some of them.”

“Betty, Betty, Betty Wales!” chanted an unseen chorus. “Time to dress
for the aftermath parade!”

So Jim said a hasty good-bye and waited under the group of elms that
Betty had pointed out, to see 19-- march by. Somebody had suggested
having a costumed procession this year, and the seniors and half a
dozen recently graduated classes had vied with one another in planning
queer and effective uniforms. There were masked classes, classes with
red parasols, classes with purple sunbonnets and purple fans, classes
with yellow caps and gowns. But 19--’s close-fitting green robes were
lighted up by weird green torches, and in the middle of the ranks
marched all the 19-- animals--the Jabberwock, the Green Dragon, the
Mock Turtle and the Gryphon from an Alice in Wonderland show, ploshkins
in assorted sizes with pink shoe-strings waving in their paws, and
finally a little reckless ritherum hopping along in the rear. It jumped
at the waving pink shoe-strings, it snatched a green lantern from
the hands of a green-robed figure and charged with it blithely into
the laughing crowd, and when it came to the elm trees where Jim was
standing it darted straight at him and whispered, “Good-bye again, Jim.
Do manage to come to Cleveland sometimes and talk to the cook,” and was
off again after a pink shoe-string before Jim had discovered what was
happening to him.

An hour later Betty shed her ritherum costume--it was rather warm,
being composed of Georgia’s gym suit, the burlap that Lucille had
bought to pack around her Morris chair, a peacock feather fan, and a
pair of snowshoes for wings--and she and Madeline, Roberta, Rachel, K.,
Nita, Helen, the B’s, and Christy went out on the fire-escape to cool
off and watch the other classes coming home.

“Must be jolly to stay up here all the time,” said Nita hungrily.
“There’s always something going on, and it’s all queer and different
and fun.”

“It’s a pretty good world, wherever you are, I think,” announced K.
briskly.

“It’s whatever kind you make it,” Madeline amended K.’s sentiment.

“And we’re all making it something rather nice that it wouldn’t be,
perhaps, without us,” Roberta added.

“We’ve never decided what it takes to make a B. C. A.,” said Madeline.
“If we had we could tell Nita, and she could cultivate the combination.”

“We shall have that left for conversation at the first tea-drinking
next fall,” laughed Christy. “There are always such dreadful pauses.”

“It’s always well to have something left for next fall just the same,”
said little Helen primly.

“Yes,” agreed Rachel, who was secretly considering a year’s study in
New York. “There may be more of us B. C. A.’s and there may be less,
but there’ll surely be a topic of conversation.”

“And an Object,” added Madeline, hugging Betty, “with curls and a
dimple, and a finger in everybody’s pie, and a few over.”

“Why, that’s just what Jim Watson said about me,” laughed Betty, “only
he didn’t call it pie.”

“Jim Watson,” said Madeline severely, “is politely requested to keep
his distance. We can’t spare you to him--not for years and years and
years to come.”

“I should think not,” echoed Christy, Rachel, and Helen in an indignant
chorus.

“Girls, please stop talking such perfect nonsense,” said Betty calmly.
“Let’s climb down the fire-escape and go to bed.”


The Stories in this Series are:

  BETTY WALES, FRESHMAN
  BETTY WALES, SOPHOMORE
  BETTY WALES, JUNIOR
  BETTY WALES, SENIOR
  BETTY WALES, B. A.
  BETTY WALES & CO.
  BETTY WALES DECIDES




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

On page 20, pow-pow has been changed to pow-wow.

On page 169, tower-room has been changed to tower room.

On page 186, gift shop has been changed to gift-shop.

On page 252, child-like has been changed to childlike.

On page 298, started has been changed to stared.

All other spelling, variants and dialect have been retained as typeset.

Some illustrations have been moved to avoid interrupting the flow of a
paragraph.




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