Betty Wales, Freshman. Dunton Edith Kellogg

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СКАЧАТЬ repeated Mary scornfully. “The whole college knows by this time. We were lunching on the notch road, near the top, when four Winsted men came up, and asked if they might join us. They knew most of us. So we said yes, if they’d brought any candy, and they told us a strange story about five girls–very young girls, they said,” interpolated Mary emphatically, “that they’d seen dashing down the notch. One was trying to eat a cookie, and another was pulling the horse’s tail, and the rest were screaming at the top of their lungs, so naturally the horse was frightened to death. Pretty soon three carriage loads of juniors came along and they confirmed the awful news and gave us the names of the victims, and you can imagine how I felt. The men want to meet you, but I told them they couldn’t because of course you’d be drowned in the river.”

      “I hope you’ll relieve their minds the next time they come to see you,” said Katherine. “Are they the youths who monopolize our piazza every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon?”

      “Two of them help occasionally.”

      Katherine winked meaningly at the rest of the Mountain Day party. “We’ll be there,” she said, “though it goes against my conscience to receive calls from such untruthful young gentlemen.”

      The next Saturday afternoon Betty and Katherine established themselves ostentatiously on the front piazza to await the arrival of Mary’s callers, Rachel had gone to play basket-ball, and Roberta had refused to conspire against Mary’s peace of mind, particularly since the plot might involve having to talk to a man. Promptly at three o’clock two gentlemen arrived.

      “Miss Brooks is that sorry, but she had to go out,” announced the maid in tones plainly audible to the two eavesdroppers. “Would you please to come back at four?”

      Katherine and Betty exchanged disappointed glances. “Checked again. She’s too much for us,” murmured Katherine. “Shall we wait?”

      “And is Miss Wales in–Miss Betty Wales?” pursued the spokesman, after a slight pause.

      The maid looked severely at the occupants of the piazza. “Yes, sor, you can see that yoursilf,” she said and abruptly withdrew.

      The man laughed and came quickly toward Betty, who had risen to meet him. “I’m John Parsons,” he said. “I roomed with your brother at Andover. He told me you were here and asked me to call. Didn’t he write to you too? Miss Brooks promised to present me, but as she isn’t in – ”

      “Oh, yes, Will wrote, and I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Parsons,” Betty broke in. “Only I didn’t know you were–I mean I didn’t know that Miss Brooks’s caller was you. Miss Kittredge, Mr. Parsons. Wasn’t your friend going to wait?”

      “Bob,” called Mr. Parsons after the retreating figure of his companion, “come back and hear about the runaway. You’re wanted.”

      It was fully half-past four when Messrs. Parsons and Hughes, remembering that they had another engagement, left their escorts by request at the gymnasium and returned from a pleasant walk through Paradise and the campus to Meriden Place, where a rather frigid reception awaited them. Betty and Katherine, having watched the finish of the basket-ball game, followed them, and spent the time before dinner in painting a poster which they hung conspicuously on Mary’s door. On it a green dragon, recently adopted as freshman class animal, charged the sophomores’ purple cow and waved a long and very curly tail in triumph. Underneath was written in large letters, “Quits. Who is going to the ΚΦ dance at Winsted?”

      “I’m dreadfully afraid mother won’t let me go though,” said Betty as they hammered in the pins with Helen’s paper-weight. “And anyhow it’s not for three whole weeks.”

      When the drawing was securely fastened, Betty surveyed it doubtfully. “I wonder if we’d better take it down,” she said at last. “I don’t believe it’s very dignified. I’m afraid I oughtn’t to have asked Mr. Parsons to call his friend back, but I did so want to meet both of them and crow over Mary. And it was they who suggested the walk. Katherine, do you mind if we take this down?”

      “Why, no, if you don’t want to leave it,” said Katherine looking puzzled. “I’m afraid Mr. Hughes didn’t have a very good time. Men aren’t my long suit. But otherwise I think we did this up brown.”

      Just then Eleanor came up, and Katherine gave her an enthusiastic account of the afternoon’s adventure. Betty was silent. Presently she asked, “Girls, what is a back row reputation?”

      “I don’t know. Why?” asked Eleanor.

      “Well, you know I stopped at the college, Katherine, to get my history paper back. Miss Ellis looked hard at me when I went in and stammered out what I wanted. She hunted up the paper and gave it to me and then she said, ‘With which division do you recite, Miss Wales?’ I told her at ten, and she looked at me hard again and said, ‘You have been present in class twelve times and I’ve never noticed you. Don’t acquire a back row reputation, Miss Wales. Good-day,’ and I can tell you I backed out in a hurry.”

      “I suppose she means that we sit on the back rows when we don’t know the lesson,” said Helen who had joined the group.

      “I see,” said Betty. “And do you suppose the faculty notice such things as that and comment on them to one another?”

      “Of course,” said Eleanor wisely. “They size us up right off. So does our class, and the upper class girls.”

      “Gracious!” said Betty. “I wish I hadn’t promised to go to a spread on the campus to-night. I wish – What a nuisance so many reputations are!” And she crumpled the purple cow and the green dragon into a shapeless wad and threw it at Rachel, who was coming up-stairs swinging her gym shoes by their strings.

      CHAPTER VI

      LETTERS HOME

      Betty was cross and “just a tiny speck homesick,” so she confided to the green lizard. Nothing interesting had happened since she could remember, and it had rained steadily for four days. Mr. Parsons, who played right tackle on the Winsted team, had written that he was laid up with a lame shoulder, which, greatly to his regret, would prevent his taking Betty to his fraternity dance. Helen was toiling on a “lit.” paper with a zealous industry which got her up at distressingly early hours in the morning, and was “enough to mad a saint,” according to her exasperated roommate, whose own brief effusion on the same subject had been hastily composed in one evening and lay neatly copied in her desk, ready to be handed in at the proper time. Moreover, “gym” had begun and Betty had had the misfortune to be assigned to a class that came right in the middle of the afternoon.

      “It’s a shame,” she grumbled, fishing out her fountain pen which had fallen off her desk and rolled under the bureau. “I shall change my lit. to afternoon–that’s only two afternoons spoiled instead of four–and then tell Miss Andrews that I have a conflict. Haven’t you finished that everlasting paper?”

      “No,” said Helen meekly. “I’m sorry that I’m so slow. I’ll go out if you want to have the girls in here.”

      “Oh no,” called Betty savagely, dashing out into the hall. Eleanor’s door was ornamented with a large sign which read, “Busy. Don’t disturb.” But the door was half-way open, and in the dusky room, lighted, as Eleanor liked to have it, by candles in old-fashioned brass sticks, Eleanor sat on a pile of cushions in the corner, strumming softly on her guitar.

      “Come in,” she called. “I put that up in case I wanted to study later. Finished your lit. paper?”

      Betty СКАЧАТЬ