Читать книгу Betty Wales, Junior - Edith K. Dunton - Страница 5

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“Hello, Betty Wales. Please amuse me.”

Betty was sitting on the floor of her own long-coveted “single,” surrounded by a bewildering array of her possessions, which she had unpacked according to her own particular system of taking everything out at once, and now, as usual, she had no idea where to dispose of them. At the sound of the voice, the unwonted pucker of anxiety left her forehead, and she jumped up, scattering the photographs she had been sorting right and left, and made a rush for the newcomer.

“Oh, Mary Brooks! Maybe I’m not glad to see you. I’m—I think I’m homesick.”

Mary grinned cheerfully. “You ought to be used to it by this time—to the joys of being back on time, I mean. It’s I that have reasons for feeling like a little lost lamb. Do you know, this is positively my first appearance at the regular opening functions.”

“Really?” laughed Betty. “What’s going to happen?”

“Nothing new, I hope,” said Mary; “but Miss Stuart delicately hinted that the wrath of Jove would descend upon me if I didn’t get here on time. Where’s everybody?”

“I don’t know,” said Betty sadly. “Didn’t you come on the eight-fifteen?”

“I did,” returned Mary with decision. “Ever since I entered college I have heard about the joyousness of coming up on the eight-fifteen on an opening night. And now I get here on time for once, and the New York and the western trains are all fiendishly late. So I come up alone in my glory on that famous eight-fifteen, and instead of a gay and festive occasion such as I have been led to expect, I find an empty house—not a soul but you to talk to, and positively nothing doing. They seem to be all new girls on my corridor.”

“I don’t think you ought to refer to freshmen as an empty house,” said Betty severely, “and anyhow it serves you right for all the times you have cut over.”

“When did you come?” asked Mary, apparently considering that one topic had been pursued far enough. “You haven’t done all this”—she indicated the miscellaneous results of Betty’s unpacking by a sweeping gesture—“in just this one evening?”

“Rather not,” said Betty. “Mary, I’ve been here two whole days—not in the Belden of course, because it wasn’t open, but in Harding; and I think that if you hadn’t come just when you did, I should have—cried,” ended Betty, in a sudden burst of confidence.

“You poor thing!” said Mary sympathetically. “I suppose it was a freshman cousin or something.”

Betty nodded. “Lucile Merrifield. She’s a dear, and she said she didn’t need me one bit, but her mother and my mother settled it that I was to come. And of course Lucile was busy with her exams. and I didn’t have anything to do all day but sit around and think what a lovely summer I’d been having. And that horrid woman we stayed with thought I was the freshman and asked me right before a whole tableful of them if I was homesick—just because Lucile happens to be tall and dignified, and her hair is straight.” Betty gave a vicious pull to the yellow curl that would escape from its companions and fall over her eyes.

Mary grinned sympathetically. “Too bad about your childish ringlets,” she said. “But I’ll bet your cousin isn’t a circumstance to mine—the eighth one from Wisconsin that came on for her examinations last June. Was yours the weeping kind?”

“Weeping!” repeated Betty, laughing at the idea of the stately Lucile dissolved in tears. “Not much. She was so calm and cool that I thought she must have flunked and was trying to cover it up. She had five examinations, Mary, and they might have been five afternoon teas for all she seemed to care; and she isn’t a dig or a prod, or anything of that kind, either. So I got worried and made her go all over the questions with me. As far as I could see, she did awfully well. Anyhow I don’t believe she can possibly have flunked.”

“What a good idea!” said Mary admiringly. “I’m afraid I didn’t take a serious enough view of my responsibilities last spring. But then the eighth cousin was perfectly hopeless and it was a mercy to everybody concerned that she failed. She was the kind of person that would rather risk making a bad break than leave anything out. In her English exam. they asked her what a leviathan was,—it’s mentioned in ‘Paradise Lost,’ you know,—and she said ‘a country near Thrace.’ I think myself that was her finish. It doesn’t do to be so positive unless you know you’re in the right.”

“I don’t believe it’s ever best to be positive,” said Betty sadly. “I was so positive that I wanted a single room, and now I’ve got one, and I’m missing Helen Chase Adams already.”

“Oh, you’ll like it when you’re settled,” Mary reassured her, glancing around the room. “Why do you have all the chiffonier drawers open at once?”

“They stick,” explained Betty savagely, “every blessed one of them. I’ve got them all open now except the bottom one, but it took me almost an hour, and I’m not going to risk having to do it all over again. And almost every one of the hooks in the closet is broken, so I can’t hang up my dresses; and look at the spots on that wall!”

Mary squinted near-sightedly at the black stains. “Jane Drew must have had a quarrel with one of her pictures and thrown an ink bottle at it,” she said. “I wonder how she covered up the tragedy. I never noticed those spots last year.”

“She must have had a very big picture,” said Betty. “My biggest Gibson girl won’t do it. And my desk won’t go into that corner where Jane had hers.”

“Number twenty-seven must have shrunk during the summer,” said Mary. “I hope my palatial apartment hasn’t lost any of its six by ten spaciousness.”

There was a long pause. “Mary,” began Betty at last, “are you tired or are you blue?”

“Blue,” declared Mary savagely, “blue as a heron. (Did we ever find one in the Mary-Bird-Club, Betty?) I wondered if you’d notice it. I hate being a senior. I know it’s going to be perfectly deadly—this seeing the last of things. How do you like being a junior?”

Betty hesitated. “Mary, does it always last,—the fun of college? Did you ever know a girl who’d been very, very fond of it for two years to get tired of it all of a sudden?”

“Never,” said Mary decidedly. “That’s just what the girls I used to know at home are always asking me. ‘Why do you stay on so long, Mary? Don’t you get bored?’ And when I try to explain, I suppose they think it all sounds very dull. I presume I should think so myself, if I hadn’t been here to see. One year is a good deal like the ones before it,—the same friends, only a few more each year, the same nice little stunts, and almost the same things to try for,—but somehow each one is different and there’s plenty of excitement all along the road. If you’re afraid of outgrowing it, as you would a prep. school, you needn’t be. College is too big to be outgrown. It has a new side ready for any new side that you can develop. I say, Betty.”

“Yes?” inquired Betty absently. She was wondering how Mary had guessed that she had developed some new sides during the long vacation.

“I thought perhaps you’d like to know, since you’re so fond of Eleanor Watson. More or less about that affair of hers last year has leaked out during the summer.”

“You mean——” faltered Betty.

“I mean about the story she signed her name to in the ‘Argus’ and didn’t exactly write. I don’t know the details, except that you were mixed up in it somehow; but I think she did the very square thing when she resigned from Dramatic Club, and I mean to stand by her, and so does Laurie. Eleanor was on the train to-night, and some of the girls rather turned the cold shoulder. I thought—you might like to know right away how matters stood.”

“Thank you,” said Betty soberly, “but I don’t believe she’ll need me much now, Mary. I think she’s learned how to help herself.”

“That’s lucky,” said Mary easily. “Now Roberta Lewis doesn’t seem to get one bit more independent. I’m afraid she’s never going to be very happy here. She ought to go in hard for writing; I know she’d make a success of it.”

“Tell her so,” advised Betty. “She adores you, and now that you’re on the ‘Argus’ staff you certainly ought to be able to influence her.”

“I suppose I ought,” conceded Mary. “The trouble is I’ve never really seen much that she wrote except those valentine verses that she did for us in her freshman year, and she says those were mostly French translations. So when I tell her that I know she can write, she says I’m prejudiced and haven’t any good reason for thinking so. She hasn’t one bit of self-confidence.”

There was a thump and then a thud in the hall. A door banged, somebody shrieked, “Oh, Polly, you darling child!” and then Katherine Kittredge burst into Betty’s room like a whirlwind, dragging Roberta Lewis after her.

“We’re just this minute in,” she panted, “on a special that they sent up from the junction, because they couldn’t bear to have us sitting around the waiting-room down there breaking the ten o’clock rule. Roberta fairly insisted that I should come here first. How’s everything starting off?”

“I insisted!” repeated Roberta indignantly. “K. was in such a hurry to get here that she wouldn’t wait for a car, and there wasn’t any carriage, and my suit case weighs a ton.”

“Well, I carried it,” retorted Katherine, fanning herself with the biggest Gibson girl. “And Mary, you should have seen the elegant Roberta, lugging my handsome telescope.”

“Did you know that we’d voted a class-tax to buy you a sole-leather suit case lined with white satin?” inquired Mary Brooks. Katherine’s battered canvas bag was a college joke.

“Glad to hear it, I’m sure,” returned Katherine serenely. “Where’s Rachel?”

“Coming,” called a merry voice, and Rachel herself appeared in the doorway and was dragged in, amid great enthusiasm.

“When did you come, Rachel?” asked Betty, leading her to a seat of honor on the window-box.

“At four,” said Rachel, “but I’ve been tutoring conditioned freshmen ever since.”

“You poor thing!” sighed Mary.

“Not a bit,” laughed Rachel. “My pocketbook is fairly bursting. Besides, they were dears, all of them. One took me to supper at Holmes’s, so she could get more time for her math., and we talked cube root and binomial theorem over the most delicious chicken salad.”

Rachel was still economizing at the little white house around the corner, but she was too happy at finding herself back in Harding again to feel one bit of envy for the campus girls, who never had to worry over finances, or plan how to make both ends meet.

The four were still all talking at once when Madeline Ayres appeared.

“No room for under-class men,” shouted Mary, brandishing a pillow.

“Toss it over, please,” said Madeline, complacently, holding out one arm for the pillow and hugging Betty with the other. “I’ll sit on it here by the door and keep them out. This is where the French I passed up last fall begins to count. I’m a junior now, if you please.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Katherine. “Good for 19—! You always belonged to us in spirit, Madeline.”

“Helen Adams has come. Let’s go call on her,” suggested Rachel, and they trooped off down the hall.

Their progress was slow, for out of almost every door excited damsels swooped down upon them, wishing to shake hands all around and to talk about everything, from where you spent your summer to the new man who was going to teach English “Lit.,” you know, and his courses would be just splendid because—and do you suppose we shall ever get our trunks?

Betty met them all with an enthusiasm which soon ceased to be feigned. The spirit of the place was contagious. It caught her up and swept her along until all her woes were forgotten or turned into merry jests.

“I’ll lend you a real French poster to cover those spots,” Madeline promised her, “and I can put up closet-hooks. I took manual training one summer, and I own a hammer.”

“Then let’s go down-town and buy the hooks,” suggested some one, “and have ices on the way back.”

“Oh, wait till to-morrow. Let’s hunt up Eleanor Watson first.”

“Where are the three B’s?”

“Has any one seen Nita Reese?”

How the evening flew! Nobody in 19— unpacked. It was much better fun to wander in gay exploring parties from one campus house to another, finding out who was back, and who had changed rooms, and hearing all the campus news. The reason why junior year is the nicest speedily became evident to Betty and her friends of 19—. By that time you know everybody and have found your place in the college world; but you are not yet weighed down by the responsibilities of seniority, nor oppressed by the nearness of the end.

When Betty returned to her disheveled apartment at ten o’clock, she found her Cousin Lucile sitting on the window-box in the dark, awaiting her arrival.

“My dear little freshman,” she began in the most patronizing tone she could manage, “don’t you know it’s high time you were safe in bed?”

“Yes,” said Lucile calmly, “but I had to consult you, Betty. I have a chance to get into this house. A Miss Reeve or Reed or something telegraphed the registrar that she was going to the Philippines to be married, and I can have her place. It’s a double room, but——”

“Not T. Reed?” cried Betty.

“I think her name was Theresa. Is her room——”

Betty dashed into the hall. “Girls,” she cried to the avenue of open doors, “T. Reed’s going to be married to a Filipino—well, anyhow, in the Philippines.”

Then she returned to Lucile, leaving her bomb to take effect as it might. “It will be lovely to have you in the house,” she said, “and the campus is certainly the place to be. I wonder if Helen knows that T.’s not coming. If so, she must have had a telegram since I saw her.”

“But Betty,” began Lucile doubtfully, “I want to find out about Miss Reed’s room and her roommate.”

“Oh, they’re all right,” broke in Betty. “I had them last year. The closet is awfully small, but next year perhaps you can have a single.”

“But Betty,” persisted Lucile, “this is a serious matter to me. Are you sure I shall like her?”

“Come and see,” laughed Betty, starting for the door. “It’s ten now and you’ll be locked in, but as long as you’re here you may as well stay with me to-night and see how we live on the campus. But then,” she turned back to add, “it’s not so important, Lucile,—your liking her or not. You can’t help liking college, roommate or no roommate, closet-hooks or no closet-hooks. (I haven’t any of those yet. That’s why my room is in such a mess,—or at least it’s one reason.)” She gave a long sigh of content. “Oh, Lucile, this is the grandest place, especially if you live up here on the campus.”

Mary Brooks came through the hall just in time to catch Betty’s last sentence.

“Why, Betty Wales,” she said severely, “what do you mean by talking like that? You told me not two hours ago that you were horribly bored.”

Betty laughed. “So I was,” she said, “two hours ago. I was sure that all the fun was over.”

“And the moral of that,” said Mary, “is: Don’t judge of the ball until it has opened. Introduce me to your cousin, please, and then both of you are elected to come and help me eat five pounds of caramels.”