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   :PG.Id: 35729
   :PG.Title: Peggy Parsons a Hampton Freshman
   :PG.Released: 2011-03-30
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Roger Frank
   :PG.Producer: the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
   :DC.Creator: Annabel Sharp
   :DC.Title: Peggy Parsons a Hampton Freshman
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1916
   :coverpage: images/cover.jpg

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Peggy Parsons a Hampton Freshman
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   This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
   almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
   re-use it under the terms of the `Project Gutenberg License`_
   included with this eBook or online at
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      Title: Peggy Parsons a Hampton Freshman
      
      Author: Annabel Sharp
      
      Release Date: March 30, 2011 [EBook #35729]
      
      Language: English
      
      Character set encoding: UTF-8

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   | :xl:`PEGGY PARSONS`
   | :xl:`A HAMPTON FRESHMAN`
   | 
   | BY
   | ANNABEL SHARP
   |
   | :sm:`AUTHOR OF “PEGGY PARSONS AT PREP SCHOOL”`
   | 
   | M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
   | CHICAGO—NEW YORK
   |
   | :sm:`MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA`


.. contents:: Contents
   :backlinks: entry
   :depth: 1

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   |
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   | :l:`INTRODUCTION`

Last year Peggy Parsons and Katherine Foster
were room-mates at Andrews Preparatory
School.

Their escapades and their hunger for good
times and adventure kept them from being great
favorites of the principal there, but they were
loved by the girls of the school and were soon
invested with a degree of leadership.

“Peggy Parsons at Prep School,” the first
book in this series, tells how much happiness
they managed to crowd into a single year.

A would-be charitable enterprise of Peggy’s is
recounted, also. And if she had never undertaken
it, mistaken though she was, she could not
have gone to Hampton, and the present volume
would never have been written.

.. File: 005.png

Mr. Huntington, a rich old man, whom people
believed to be poverty-stricken because of the way
he lived, became a great friend of Peggy’s as
the result of a Thanksgiving dinner party she
arranged for the cooking-class of her school to
give him.

She and Katherine were instrumental, through
an adventure in playing amateur detectives, in
finding Mr. Huntington’s grandson, of whom he
had lost track.

The grandson—the “Jim” of the present book—was
an Amherst student about Peggy’s own
age.

Katherine Foster had planned to go to Hampton
College, but Peggy could not see her way
clear. The room-mates were broken-hearted at
the prospect of not being together for another
year. After Katherine had been assigned another
room-mate, Gloria Hazeltine, Peggy gave
up hope of going and could not plan with any
interest for any other kind of year.

Mr. Huntington then stepped in and turned
over for Peggy’s use the income from a dear
little group of bungalows which he had named
“Parsons Court.”

So Katherine and Peggy were enabled to look
forward to college together just as they had
their prep school.

.. class:: center

   |
   |
   |
   |
   | :xl:`PEGGY PARSONS`
   | :xl:`A HAMPTON FRESHMAN`

CHAPTER I—MAKING AN IMPRESSION
==============================

“Katherine Foster!”

“Peggy Parsons!”

Two suit-cases went banging down on the
wooden platform and two radiant figures hurled
themselves into each other’s arms, oblivious of
the shriek of departing trains, the rattling of
baggage trucks, and the jostling crowds who
were at liberty to laugh at their impulsiveness.

For this was Springfield, where East meets
West on its way to half a dozen New England
colleges, and where every fall the same scenes
of joyous greeting are enacted with the annual
accompaniment of little squeals of delighted welcome
and many glad kisses.

“Well, Peggy, you look just the same as ever!”

“It’s been a perfect *century*, Katherine! Going
right up to Hampton? Taking the 9:10?
So am I. Oh, so *much* to talk about——”

Breathlessly chattering all the while, the two
girls in blue serge, who had been room-mates
last year at preparatory school, gathered up their
suit-cases again and crossed the tracks to the
other side of the station to wait for the Hampton
train. Engines steamed along before and behind
them, but neither looked away from the
other’s glowing face during the crossing, nor did
they cease both to talk at once until they were
actually seated in their train some time later,
packed in with a mob of laughing and attractive
girls with suit-cases in the aisles, in the racks
over their heads, and in their laps.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we met this way?”
cried Katherine, while Peggy was trying to hand
the remaining untraveled bits of their tickets to
the perspiring conductor. “We’ll see our new
rooms for the first time together, and we’ll make
a very nice impression on the inhabitants of
Ambler House because we can plan out some kind
of grand entry to appeal to them.”

Peggy laughed. “It’s an awfully *big* place
we’re going to,” she said, looking about at the
swaying crowds of girls. “I’m just beginning to
realize it. It will take more than our planning
to make any impression at all, I think. And
maybe nobody will *ever* notice us. It won’t be
like Andrews.”

“You’re still Peggy Parsons, aren’t you? And
I’m still your room-mate, Katherine Foster.
*And* we’re going to live in one of the grandest
suites on campus—oh, I don’t believe they will
pass us by altogether.” And Katherine gave a
little swaggering motion of her head that sent
Peggy into gales of laughter.

“You’re conceited and snobbish, friend room-mate,”
she giggled. “The summer has spoiled
you.”

But Katherine smiled back complacently into
her eyes.

Suddenly there was a curious stir all about
them. The girls who had been standing in the
aisle were all pushing toward the end of the car,
and those seated were struggling up from under
their luggage, their faces bright with anticipation.

“Katherine,” whispered Peggy, “I think we’re
there!”

Oh, the world of meaning in that one sentence.
The hopes, the expectations, the pleasures and
good times for four whole years were summed
up in it, and Katherine silently nodded her head,
unable to speak.

.. File: 014.png

The brakeman was already calling out something
that he meant for “Hampton,” and he
rounded out his shout with the long-drawn wail,
“Don’t leave any articles in the car!”

As if any of those precious and bulky suit-cases
could be forgotten! The stampede began
in earnest as soon as the train stopped, and
Peggy and Katherine found themselves swept
out to the platform and jostled down the steps
and thrust forward toward the station of their
own college town.

The girls from the train rushed this way and
that, and other girls from the college rushed to
meet them. Katherine spied a taxi that had still
two vacant seats.

“Come, taxi,—quick,” she gasped in Peggy’s
ear. And the two went running forward, their
suit-cases bumping and thumping against their
knees. Before they reached the machine they
saw that they were racing with a mob of other
girls, all frankly eager to be the first to secure
places in the last cab with a vacancy.

In every direction other taxis were whirring
off, filled to overflowing with girls and bags, and
here and there the rumble of hoofs mixed in, as
a pair of horses drawing an old-fashioned cab
likewise laden dashed off.

Peggy and Katherine were panting. It had
become a very exciting race. A taller girl, with
a lighter suit-case, sprinted ahead of them and
reached the taxi first. But she stopped to ask
the driver his price, and while she was doing so
Katherine and Peggy piled in.

The taller girl turned to take her rightful
place and saw two hot and beaming young ladies
in the exact corner she had run so hard to claim.

She stepped back with a chagrined laugh, and
Peggy and Katherine laughed too, with the utmost
good nature, now that they had attained
what they sought. They heard the other two occupants
of their car murmuring the names of
college houses to the chauffeur, and with a thrill
of pride Peggy said, “Ambler House.”

“And you, miss?” the driver asked Katherine.

“Why, Ambler House, too, of course,” she
said, and then blushed scarlet for fear the other
girls would think her an idiot, for at the moment
it had indeed seemed to her that even a taxi-cab
driver ought to know that she was going to live
in college wherever Peggy was.

The quaint, prim streets of the New England
town were nothing but so much colored confusion
to the eyes of the four in the cab. Each one
had a consciousness that this perhaps was the
height of life: that they would never touch anything
better than this again. Riding along thus,
packed tight in a taxi, through Hampton, to college
for the first time.

They felt as if all previous experiences were
washed away—and all future ones unknown and
unguessed at. Everything was before them—the
glory of being young singing in their hearts
and going to their heads like wine—what wonder
that they felt life had been made just for them
and was already beginning to yield its fruits into
their eager hands!

The cab went grating up a hill, and in a moment
there was a bright stretch of green before
them, with any number of red brick buildings on
it, some of them covered with ivy. Hampton
College was spread before their gaze without
any warning to prepare them. But each girl
knew, as if she had seen it often, that this was
really College.

Katherine and Peggy craned their necks quite
frankly out of the window, and when they drew
their heads in, the other girls followed their example
shamelessly.

“It looks—nice,” ventured Peggy, with a long
sigh of satisfaction.

.. File: 018.png

“It looks just—the way I thought it would,”
answered one of the strangers, and then gave a
little embarrassed laugh because her voice had
sounded so thrilled.

The taxi made a sharp turn, and they were
actually inside the sacred precincts of Campus—there
on each side were the rows of college
houses, and in the distance was a magnificent
structure of stone. The morning sun shone over
it all. A sense of homelikeness and a strange
comfortable feeling of love for it came, even at
this first view, into their hearts.

“We are to live in one of these houses,” Peggy
rapturously reminded Katherine. “In a moment
the taxi will stop and it will be *our* house. Katherine,
pinch my arm. It all seems so queerly
familiar, maybe I’m just dreaming it after all.”

But the taxi did stop in a minute or two, and
the driver was opening the door and saying
“Ambler House” in a matter-of-fact tone. The
two other girls nodded good-bye to Peggy and
Katherine. Katherine stepped down and was
handed her bag. Peggy was conscious that the
long porch of the brick house before which they
had drawn up was filled with girls interestedly
watching for freshman newcomers. She thought
of their plan to make a good initial impression,
and descended as gracefully as might be, with a
charming little smile of eagerness and anticipation
that was not assumed at all.

The driver was lifting down her heavy suit-case.
And then quite unexpectedly came the fall
that follows pride. Only, while the pride had
been Peggy’s, the fall was her suit-case’s.

Thump! Thud! it went smashing down to the
ground, and its bulging sides flew apart, and hair-brushes,
mirrors, nightgown, kimono, and powder
boxes and tooth paste all shot out in every
direction and rolled ignominiously about on the
campus lawn, in full view of the crowded porch
of Ambler House.

Peggy’s crimson ears caught shrieks of
laughter, her tear-filled eyes saw girlish figures
doubling up in mirth—and under her feet
and round about, the ground was white with
powder, redolent with oozing perfume and
strewn with her most intimate belongings.

There was something about it all that had the
awful publicity of a nightmare. Such things
couldn’t really happen. Oh, if she could only
melt away—or wake up or even crawl back into
the taxi and hide.

“Shall I help you pick the things up?”

“I’m afraid this powder can never be scraped
up again. I’ve put some back into the box, but
there’s quite a bit of grass and gravel mixed with
it.”

She was completely surrounded by helpful
girls, who had flown out from the porch, their
laughter still on their lips, and were now kneeling
and stooping everywhere about the scene of
the catastrophe.

“Your clean shirtwaist,” cried one of these
helpers sympathetically, as she pulled a fragile
bit of dimity and Cluny lace from under the taxi-cab
where it had fluttered. “It won’t be good for
very much now until it’s laundered.”

Into the suit-case the things were tumbled with
despatch but not neatness. The taxi driver was
contrite, but he did not offer to touch any of the
scattered feminine luggage and insisted quite
audibly that there had been “too many things in
there anyway.”

Katherine paid him, eying him reproachfully,
and he chugged away, leaving the two heart-broken
freshmen greatly discomfited by the mishap.

Thus it was that the two girls who had hoped
to make so attractive an impression slunk into
Ambler House with a straggling procession of
merry followers behind them carrying odds and
ends that refused to be crammed back into the
damaged suit-case. And thus it came about
also that they looked about Suite 22 with blind
eyes and failed to realize that it was one of “the
grandest suites on Campus” and overlooked
Paradise.

Peggy sat down in a little heap on the window
seat in their living-room and didn’t even appreciate
that it *was* a window seat, and one of very,
very few at college.

“I’m glad it—didn’t happen in Springfield,”
was the first thing Peggy said.

“Ye-es,” admitted Katherine, standing uncertainly
in the middle of the room. And then she
added irrelevantly: “I think there are awfully
nice girls in this house.”

Peggy buried her little burning face in the
upholstery of the window seat. “Do—you?”
she asked in muffled tones. “I didn’t dare look
at them.”

“I thought they seemed a very—*jolly* set,” pursued
Katherine tentatively.

She was rewarded by a rueful chuckle from
the figure on the window seat.

“And anyway,” Katherine followed up her
advantage, “they *did notice* us,—more than they
do most freshmen. Paid rather particular attention,
in fact.”

That was too much for happy-go-lucky little
Peggy and she laughed until she shook, even
while the contradictory tears ran forth from her
swollen eyes and trickled through her fingers
onto the green leather seat-cushion.

“I—I’ll—never go down to luncheon, Kathie,”
she protested between a laugh and a sob. “I’ll
never go outside this room again. I can’t possibly
bear to look them in the face.”

Rap-tap-tap!

.. File: 024.png

Katherine whirled toward the door and Peggy
sat up.

Rap-tap-*tap*! It was more insistent this time,
and the knob of the door turned even as Peggy
called out a none too cordial “Come” that broke
pathetically in the middle.

A dark-haired girl entered impetuously, a
sparkle in her friendly eyes. Peggy remembered
her with an inward qualm as one of the most appreciative
spectators on the porch a few moments
ago.

“Aren’t you folks *crazy* about your rooms?
Have you seen the view over Paradise? It’s
wonderful. I’ve been wondering who would
have these. I live right across the hall—and I—I——”

Those sparkling eyes fairly danced now, and
Peggy became aware of a tiny package being
thrust forward by the pretty visitor.

“I saw yours was trampled, so I brought you
some tooth-paste!” finished the girl, to their
amazement.

She had scarcely left them, swinging mentally
between indignation and bewildered gratitude,
when a pair of girls came unceremoniously in
upon them without knocking at all, and stood
hesitating before them, arms entwined about each
other and holding something half out of sight.

“I always think it’s a ghastly thing to be without
powder,” one of them finally mustered the
courage to say, “and I came away with two
boxes. It’s rice powder, flesh tint,—I hope you
like that as well as white; and I brought you
some—and a chamois. Yours was muddy. I
picked it up, but I parted with it again. I knew
you wouldn’t possibly want it,—it couldn’t make
your face anything but *black*.”

“And here’s a—waist.” The other was speaking
now. “I thought you might be—traveling
light, and—since nobody’s trunks have come,
please wear this down to luncheon. It’s my *best*
one, so I won’t deprecate it at all. I think it’s
a darling, and if you’ll give it its first wearing,
I’ll be only too happy.”

Katherine glanced across at Peggy and smiled.
Her room-mate was wiping away the last gleam
of moisture from her eyes, and the inner sunlight
of her spirit was beginning to shine through
the gloom.

She rose and went toward the girls, but they
laid their offerings on a chair and withdrew.
While Peggy was looking after them appreciatively,
another stranger entered on a similar
mission.

For fifteen minutes, while Peggy and Katherine
were making themselves presentable for
luncheon, the gift-bearers kept coming, leaving
their present on the dressing-table in the bedroom
or the window seat in the living-room,
sometimes saying nothing at all, and sometimes
a great deal.

“You won’t mind going down now?” Katherine
asked.

“N-not so much,” admitted Peggy, putting
dabs of perfume out of various bottles here and
there on her cheered-up countenance, on her
fluffy gold-brown hair, and on the new waist,
contributed.

For at least six girls had brought perfume
and loyal Peggy meant to have one represented
just as truly as another, so she followed this
neutral course of using all,—with a resulting
odor that was anything but neutral.

As she went into the big dining-room, each
giver could distinctly discern the pervading
sweetness of her own scent bottle and was satisfied.

It seemed to Peggy that every face was lifted
and turned toward her as she and Katherine
came in. There was a temptation to walk with
lowered eyes, and sink into the seat the head
waitress might indicate, without meeting a single
person’s gaze.

But casting this desire aside, she went in
bravely, her eyes taking in the whole room. And
every girl smiled back at her with the very essence
of friendship and proprietorship, for there
was hardly a girl in the room who had not contributed
something that the radiant freshman
was even then wearing, or had just made use
of.

So Peggy did not have to wait until the others
in her house had learned to love her, but she
was taken from the first day into their hearts.
And she felt the warmth of their love around
her even while she went through so prosaic a
ceremony as the partaking of a meager college
luncheon.

.. File: 029.png

CHAPTER II—SUITE 22
===================

It was right in the middle of Freshman Rains.

The faces of the new girls appeared white and
mournful, pressed against the dormitory windows,
or flushed and laughing from between rubber
helmets and slickers out on the campus, according
to their dispositions.

Up and down the second floor corridor of
Ambler House trooped the usual forenoon procession,
umbrella tips clicking on the polished
boards: those who were going out to classes
making a flapping sound with their rubber garments,
those returning giving out a sloshing
noise that advertised the weather outside in an
unfavorable manner.

Before several of the doors wet umbrellas were
open on the floor to dry, while tiny rivulets
trickled steadily from the steel prongs. They
looked like big black bats which had flown in
to seek shelter from the outer torrents and might
be expected to take wing again at any minute.

It was not a hilarious atmosphere at best, but,
to add to its dripping depression, two wails of a
most long-drawn and lugubrious sort began to be
wafted down the length of the hall over the tops
of the wet umbrellas, drifting in heart-brokenly
through the students’ doors, and dying away in
receding cadences whenever a disconsolate head
lifted itself from a cushion to listen or a helmet
strap was shoved back from a surprised and inquisitive
ear.

“M—MMm-MO-O-Oh,” went the wail, and
then “Moo-oo-oo,” with a pastoral significance
that was particularly mystifying.

No use for any girl to tell herself that this
was the wind howling—or the rain dejectedly descending
on a tin roof—for no wind ever howled
so precisely up and down scales with such sobbingly
human and barnyard notes, and no rain
was ever known to be so surprisingly vocal, nor
so loud and threatening one moment and so
tremulously broken and far away the next.

“Go! Gug-gug-go! Gug-gug-GO-go-go!”
screamed the dual wail, apparently expressive of
the utmost suffering, and yet, through it all,
maintaining a baffling rhythmical quality and a
monotony of utterance that sent a shuddering
wonder in its wake as it coursed down the hall.

But during such a disheartening season as
Freshman Rains the spirit of investigation is not
keen, and the residents on the second floor preferred
to distract their attention by lessons that
must be learned or by long and rambling letters
home that ended with vague hints that somebody
in their house was being killed down the
hall.

.. File: 032.png

It was not until the voices broke out into wild
and mirthless laughter that their apathetic spirits
were aroused to protest.

“Goodness, girls, what’s that awful noise?” an
indignant brown head poked itself out from one
of the umbrella-guarded doors and sent its peevish
remonstrance down the corridor. In an instant
every door framed a face—or two faces—and
a babble of questions was echoed back and
forth.

But triumphantly right through the shrill notes
of their eager queries rang the weird and displeasing
sound that had so disturbed them.

“Ha-HA! Ho-HO! He-HEE! Haw-HAW!”

“It’s too much!” averred the girl who had
spoken first. “*Where* is that sound being made?
And *what* is it? Seems to me as if it were from
Suite 22—do you think somebody is torturing
those freshmen?” It was just what everybody
did think, but they dreaded the admission.
“Let’s go in there,” the girl continued, “and—and
find out.” She ended rather weakly, shrinking
before the task of investigating so unearthly
a sound as that.

The girls were flocking forth, some still in
their damp slickers, the rain glistening on them;
others all immaculate just as they were ready
to start out to recitations: and still a lazy third
contingent, who had not yet had any classes or
who were wantonly cutting them, as sweet as
flowers in Japanese silk kimonos and little pattering
slippers.

Together they made the charge on Door 22.

Crowding in at the breach as it swung open,
they gasped in sudden bewilderment at the sight
that met their eyes.

Standing rigidly side by side like two soldiers
on parade, but with their hands solemnly placed
upon their diaphragms while they emitted simultaneously
the weird noises that had alarmed the
house, were Peggy Parsons and Katherine Foster,
the idols of Ambler House!

Their eyes widened at the wholesale intrusion
and their hands fell limply to their sides, and
then, as the indignant chorus broke out around
them, they looked at each other in crimson confusion
and burst out laughing.

“Why—c-could you h-h-hear us, g-girls?”
cried Katherine incoherently through her shaking
spasms of mirth.

“Hear you?” echoed Hazel Pilcher, who had
led the charge upon them. “Hear? Well, my
*dears*, did you think you were exactly whispering?
I never listened to so awful a concert in
my life. It’s a wonder I didn’t call the house-matron.
Oh, you incorrigible youngsters, what
in the world was it?”

Peggy’s face assumed an aggrieved expression
immediately.

.. File: 035.png

“It was only our lesson,” she responded somewhat
sulkily.

“Lesson! My goodness, what are they giving
the freshmen now that their lessons turn out to
be imitations of a menagerie? Why, when I
was a freshman”—(with a very superior air, for
Hazel Pilcher was now enjoying all the glory of
a sophomore’s exalted position)—“we had Latin
and French and math and history, but I never
heard of a course in ghostly noises. I’m sure
that in my year they at least spared us that.”

“Just the samey that was our lesson,” Peggy
persisted, “that was our practice work for to-morrow’s
yell.”

“Do you mean——?” Hazel began to understand,
for one cannot be a sophomore without
knowing most of the abbreviations in which college
terminology abounds.

“Elocution, if we have to simplify it,” said
Peggy. “I suppose you girls didn’t take that
course. Well, Katherine and I are just—taking
it for all it’s worth. I guess we want to learn to
speak correctly and place our voices right from
the diaphragm and make full and open
tones——”

“Spare muh!” interposed a senior who was
known to be already practicing up for dramatics.
“I hear nothing but that sort of thing all day
long these days. I might have guessed what
your vocal gymnastics meant—but they were so
particularly horrible——”

“Well, the worse they sound the better they
are,” murmured Peggy, deprecatingly. “And I
thought myself we did it rather well.”

Elocution, or, as the girls called it with enthusiasm,
yellocution or yell, was an elective
course that entailed no studying, but a vast deal
of labor along a different line. The victims
who were beguiled into taking it, thinking to gain
an easy course minus mental effort, that would
count nevertheless a perfectly good two hours a
week for their degree, were often mere tearful
wrecks after the first few days when they were
stood up before an enormous, gaping class and
put through test after test to the running accompaniment
of wounding comment on their enunciation,
their manner, their throats, their gestures—everything.

They became acquainted for the first time
with all the distressful mystery of larynxes and
pharynxes—which most of them had always supposed
were the names of diseases—they learned
about diaphragms, too, and were forced to
breathe in different ways and shout and cry
“Ha-ha,” all the time feeling for the muscular
hammer stroke at their waist lines. It was so
embarrassing to Peggy at first that she couldn’t
make any sound at all when they told her to say
“Ha-ha,” and it was only after three attempts
that she managed a faint and disheartened
squeak.

“Your voice is little and thin,” criticised the
teacher sharply. “I shall give you exercises to
round it out.”

And that’s what she had done, and these were
what Peggy and her faithful room-mate were
practicing at the moment of the inrush of
visitors.

She explained to her guests how little and thin
her voice was, but they laughed scornfully and
said if she had any more of a one, they’d see that
she was put off campus, that, as far as they were
concerned, they believed she had the biggest and
the fattest voice on record, which seemed to restore
Peggy’s self-respect in a way marvelous
to behold.

“A person can be happy,” she assured them
conversationally, “just so long as she doesn’t
know anything about herself—how she talks, how
she looks or how she impresses other people.
But the minute you get her conscious of all these
larynx-pharynx-diaphragm machines inside her
she’ll never know another happy minute until she
conquers them all and can speak just like a Nazimova
with ’em. Though Nazimova is rather
sobby, I’m told—maybe I’d better train myself up
after Blanche Ring instead.”

“Peggy,” Katherine put in at this point questioningly,
“don’t you think we might set the water
over and give the girls some tea?”

At this delightful prospect many of the girls—especially
the little lazy kimonoed ones—sat right
down wherever they happened to be, in a chair or
on the floor, with such looks of blissful anticipation
on their faces that they were a pleasant
sight. It wasn’t often tea was served in the middle
of a rainy forenoon and the two Andrews
freshmen were already so practiced in little parties
before they came to college, that even a cup
of tea served by them had a grace and an added
interest, that it could not have possessed in the
rooms of girls who were just tasting their first
bit of life away from home.

Peggy looked in some consternation at the comfortable
crowd with its expectant and gleeful
expression, and demurred slowly.

“I just *have* to train my voice,” she said, “but
I suppose, even with them here, I can go right
on?”

A groan greeted this proposal that was anything
but complimentary.

Peggy looked hurt. “Oh, you just wait,” she
said vindictively, but with a laugh struggling
for utterance at the same time. “Some day you’ll
pay to hear me—see if you won’t—and I mean to
work at it right along all through four years and
then—and—then——” her voice grew dreamy
and her eyes stared off into a heavenly future,
“and then maybe I can be in the mob at senior
dramatics!”

The senior of the party laughed at the pretty
compliment, for she herself was only in the mob,
and her classmates didn’t think she had such a
marvelous success either—so it was pleasant to
have the adoration of a popular freshman.

“I’m sure you will be,” she said graciously,
“and with one accord we all accept the future mob
member’s invitation to tea.” And she sat down
with the rest and waited patiently.

With a sigh, Peggy lit the little alcohol lamp
under the tea kettle and Katherine dived mysteriously
under the desk to emerge a moment later
with something that sent a general shout of approval
through the entire group.

“A box! A box!” they cried, “Katherine has
a box from home!”

Nothing else in life possesses quite the wonder
and the satisfying delight of a real box from
home. If the parents at home only knew of the
wide-eyed envy of all the girls as they cluster
around one of these brighteners of college existence
as it is being opened, there would be a
continuous procession of expressmen tramping
in at the back door of all the college houses, week
in and week out, and every single closet shelf
would hold its quota of jam jars, home-made
cookies, and fine large grape-fruit so that the
same glow of satisfaction and sense of being
loved would abide in each girl’s heart all the
time.

The tea ball was being daintily dipped in and
out of the steaming cups, the cold chicken was
being eagerly passed down the line of girls, when
the door of suite 22 opened again and a confused
and blushing stranger, tall, with wonderful
reddish hair and baby-blue eyes, stepped inside
and asked in a voice that was so full of
fright that it would never have passed in that
elocution class of Peggy’s, if this was Miss Katherine
Foster’s room.

“I’m trying to find Miss Foster,” the scared
voice went on, “because I was to have roomed
with her this year. I’m Gloria——”

With a single bound, the impulsive Peggy had
reached the beautiful stranger and had thrown
her arms around her neck. It was all her fault,
she was thinking, all her fault that this nice,
nice girl had been deprived of the finest room-mate
on campus, for while Peggy and Katherine
were at Andrews Preparatory School, Peggy had
not known that she herself could go to college
until the last minute, and Katherine had already
been assigned another room-mate. When Peggy
had been given the money to come, however, by
old Mr. Huntington, her friend, Katherine had
written to Gloria Hazeltine—who stood before
them now—and had explained that she just must
room with her own Peggy, and would Gloria
mind and she could easily find somebody else.

Neither of the girls had seen Gloria before,
but at this first glimpse of her, Peggy’s heart
was warm with a sense of wanting to make up
to her for having taken her place, and hence the
smothering arms she wrapped so quickly around
the newcomer’s neck.

All the embarrassment of the new guest fled
at this surprisingly eager reception. She drew
back from Peggy’s arms and smiled happily
down into her face.

“Oh, oh,” she cried, “I wish more than ever
that you were my room-mate! Which is Peggy
Parsons that has taken you away from me?”

Peggy at once saw the other’s mistake and
flushed. “I’m the guilty party,” she admitted.
“I’m Peggy. But I want you please to like me
a little—anyway. And now——” suddenly
changing to a business-like tone of hospitality,
“sit right down and have some tea. Girls, this
is Morning Glory, Katherine’s and my best
friend. You don’t mind my calling you that?”
she inquired anxiously. “That’s the way Katherine
and I spoke of you to ourselves and you—your
looks bear it out so well,” she faltered.

Gloria, very much taken into the Ambler
House set, and already being plied with tea and
wonderful beaten biscuit, didn’t mind anything,
and in a few minutes the whole room seemed to
glow with a pervading happiness and content
that took no account of the gloomy weather outside,
and for this season at least the bugaboo
ghost of the Freshman Rains was laid.

.. File: 046.png

CHAPTER III—PEGGY’S MASTERPIECE
===============================

Peggy was bending absorbedly over her desk
one evening biting her pen and then writing a
bit and now and then crossing out part of what
she had written, all with a kind of seraphic smile
that puzzled Katherine more and more until she
finally just had to speak about it.

“What are you doing, room-mate?” she demanded;
“that look is so—so awfully unlike your
usual expression.”

“Hush,” said Peggy, glancing up and waving
her pen solemnly toward the other. “It’s a poet’s
look.”

“A——? Peggy Parsons, you’re rooming
with me under false pretenses. If you’re going
to turn into a genius I’m going home. You
know I perfectly hate geniuses and there are so
many funny ones around college. I always
thought that at least you——” her tone was
scathing and beseeching at the same time, “at
least you were immune.”

“Maybe I am,” said Peggy speculatively.
“What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“Immune. Could a person be it without knowing
it, do you suppose?”

Katherine had thrown herself across the room
and had kissed Peggy fervently and repentantly
at this remark. “Oh, I take it all back, Peggy,”
she cried, “you’re not a genius. They always understand
every word in the dictionary and you
are—you are just a dear little dunce, after all!”

“Well, I like that!” exclaimed the injured
young poet. “Let me read you this, Katherine,”
she continued with shining eyes, “and then you’ll
see—oh, Katherinekins, Katherinekins, what a
bright room-mate you have, and how proud you’ll
be of me to-morrow when Miss Tillotson reads
this out in English 13.”

Katherine glanced toward the inky manuscript
suspiciously.

“Is it very long?” she inquired.

Peggy only shot her a reproachful glance and
began to read in a sweet, thrilly voice, that already
showed the effects of strenuous elocution
training and would have made the veriest nonsense
in the world seem beautiful by reason of
its triumphant youth and its perfect conviction.

   | “Dreams that are dear—of night—of day—
   | All I could think or hope or plan:
   | Naught is so sweet in that dream world’s sway
   | As this wonderful hour of the Present’s span.

There was a silence in the room when she had
finished, and Peggy folded her manuscript up
tenderly and laid it away on her desk with an air
that was little short of reverent.

“How did you do it?” breathed Katherine, carried
away by the magic of the voice rather than
by any clear idea of what the voice had read.
But she had a great deal of faith in Peggy, and
anything she would read like that must be very
fine. So Katherine passed her judgment on it
immediately.

“Do you like it?” Peggy pleaded, “oh, do you?
Oh, I’m so glad. It’s—it’s just a piece of my
soul, Katherine.”

Katherine accompanied her room-mate to English
13 next day with a pleasant sense of exhilaration
in her heart, for wasn’t this the day Peggy
was to be praised before them all—freshmen,
sophomores, juniors and seniors alike—for her
wonderful poem?

There was a little stir and flutter through Recitation
room 27 as the bright-eyed young literary
lights of the college trooped in.

English 13 had to be held in the largest recitation
room on campus, for it was the one class that
everybody would rather go to than not. It was
purely elective with a number of divisions and
you could walk by and decide whether or not you
wanted to go in—and you always decided to go
in.

Grey sweaters over the backs of chairs, a blur
of black furs, youthful heads with hair all done
alike, lolling arms along the chair-tops, slim
white hands toying with pencils or sweater buttons—a
gigantic, lazy, comfortable, enjoying-life
sort of a class when you came in from the
back of the room, but as you went down toward
the front and glanced back, there was a light of
eager anticipation shining in every face, a universal
expression of intelligent interest such as
it is the fortune of few college professors, alas,
to behold in this world.

Peggy and Katherine had dropped the wonderful
poem in the 13 box outside the door—it being
written on pale-blue paper so that Peggy would
recognize it at once in the bundle that would soon
be brought in, in Miss Tillotson’s arms.

They sat as near the front as they could get,
and that queer, unaccountable, crimson uneasiness
that affects authors when their work is
about to be read in public—part pleasurable but
mostly agony—swept Peggy in a miserable flood
and she sat deaf, dumb and blind to all that was
going on around her until she heard the bell
strike that announced the opening of class.

Miss Tillotson at this minute came in, her
arms full of manuscript, as usual, her glance
moving lightly over the rustling audience of girls,
who were beginning to sit up straight with that
eager interest flaming. Miss Tillotson was always sure
of a response. From the moment she
fingered the first manuscript and began to read
in her wonderful voice that made the good things
seem so much better than they were and the bad
things so much worse, every pause she made,
every raised-eye-brow query, every slight little
twist of amused smile was received with a collective
long-drawn breath, a murmur of appreciation
or a small, sudden sweeping storm of laughter
that convulsed the entire giant class at once,
only to drop away suddenly to still attention as
her voice again picked up the thread of narrative
or resumed the verse.

It is a pity but true that Peggy heard absolutely
nothing of her adored 13 to-day until her
own blue-folded poem was lifted up. She had
gone through a hundred different emotions in
the few minutes that she had already spent in
this classroom. Every time Miss Tillotson’s
fingers lingered near her manuscript in selecting
what next to read, a shiver of despair went up
and down her spine. Oh, why had she done such
a thing? She, only a freshman, to have had the
effrontery to write a poem when all these upper-classmen—and
even the Monthly board members—were
in the class—and had written such
wonderful things! Of course there was the approval
of Katherine by which she had set so
much store a short few hours ago. But—she
glanced at Katherine now sitting so tranquilly
beside her. Katherine was only a freshman herself!
What did her approval mean? She hated
herself for the disloyalty of the thought, but still
she could not help wishing that she had never
shown the poem to Katherine and then she could
make out it was some one else’s and not have to
suffer the awful humiliation——

Miss Tillotson was reading! Oh, it had actually
come—this horrible calamity! Nothing could
happen to save her now. Her poor little blue
poem was being read out to all these wonderful
girls of Hampton and she could not prevent it.
Drowning, drowning in a sea of confusion, there
drifted hazily through Peggy’s mind a pathetic
story she had once read in a newspaper about a
man whose ship was sinking and who had put a
note in a bottle, “All hope gone. Good-bye forever.”

When the smooth voice of Miss Tillotson
stopped there was a slight rustle over the class,
and then with one accord the girls burst out into
a laugh.

It was the merest ripple of enjoying titter, but
in Peggy’s crimson ears it roared and echoed until
the mocking sound of it was the one thing in
the world. She lifted her swimming eyes and
kept them on Miss Tillotson’s face and even
achieved a somewhat ghastly smile on her own
account, believing, poor child, that she could thus
keep secret the awful fact of her identity as the
writer of that “thing”—the poem had already
descended to this title in her mind—and that
neither Miss Tillotson nor the girls need ever
know.

“If all that the writer could ‘think or hope or
plan’ is expressed in this particular—flight,”
smiled Miss Tillotson, with that dear little quirk
to her mouth that Peggy had loved so many times
but which hurt now, oh, beyond words to tell,
“I should think that dream world of hers would
resemble a nightmare.”

Another gale of laughter swept the class, fluffy
heads leaned back against the chairs in abandon
and shirt-waisted shoulders shook.

Peggy felt that if Katherine looked at her or
ventured a pat of sympathy she would die. But
Katherine, when Peggy’s miserable glance sought
her face, was gazing interestedly around the room
from literary light to literary light as if to determine
which could have been guilty of the blue
manuscript. It certainly was a brilliant way to
ward off detection from her room-mate and
Peggy was grateful.

Peggy hardly knew how she got home that day.
She and Katherine did not speak until they had
gained the safety of their own suite and then
they put a “Busy” sign on the door, and sat down
on their couch.

“Katherine,” said Peggy at last, “one of two
things must happen now. Either I shall never
touch pen to paper again or I’ll keep at writing
until I make a success of it and show Miss Tillotson
that I can after all.”

“Yes, room-mate,” agreed Katherine solemnly,
“that’s the only alternative open to you now.”

The tragic whiteness of Peggy’s face deepened.

“Never again, or—never give it *up* until I’ve
made good,” she murmured. “It might mean—more
times like this, Katherine, if I kept on,”
she reminded tentatively.

.. File: 057.png

“Yes, Peggy,” Katherine answered slowly, “I
think it *would* mean more times like this.”

“And nothing but my own determination to go
on,—no reason to think I have any particular
talent or ability—she has already taken away all
that notion. Just the will to do it whether I can
or not—to show her that I can.”

“Yes,” agreed Katherine once more, “that’s
all you’d have to go on. *I* think you are good at
writing, but then I think you can do anything.
I can’t write myself, so my opinion really isn’t
so very valuable. You’d have to do it without encouragement.”

“I want her respect, Katherine; I want to have
her think in the end that I’m the best writer that
ever took Thirteen, but—it would mean giving
most of my time and all my energies to my English—and
I might not turn out any good in the
end.”

“True,” Katherine again attacked her room-mate’s problem,
“and if you never touch pen to
paper again” (the phrase had them both) “you
can soon forget this hurt to-day and you need
not put yourself in a similar position again, and
your main work can go to—well, to math or anything
else.”

Peggy paced up and down the room and Katherine,
never doubting but that this was the most
serious problem that had ever been fought out in
college, followed her room-mate’s figure with eyes
that brimmed with sympathy and a heartful of
affectionate loyalty that longed to be of help and
could not.

“Say, Peggy,” she said suddenly, “I want to
take a note over to the note-room for one of the
girls in my Latin class. Don’t you want to come
along? This doesn’t have to be decided all at
once, does it?”

Peggy silently slipped on her sweater again
and the girls ran across the campus to the big
recitation hall and thence down the basement
steps to the note-room. Crowds of girls were
swarming into and out of this place where, on
little boards—one to each class—the girls left
their communications for each other under the
proper initials. In so large a college it was
necessary to have some easy and direct means
of reaching each other without delay or the expense
of telephone or postage. Every girl went
to the note-room once every day—and a particularly
popular one ran down after each class to
gather in the sheaves of invitations, business
notes, and club meeting announcements that were
sure to be hers.

Peggy and Katherine squeezed through the
crowds, greeting many other freshmen as they
were suddenly brought face to face, and at length
they stood before the freshman bulletin and Katherine
stuck her note in the rack at the letter R,
while Peggy glanced, from habit, back to her own
initial. There were many little important-looking
notes stuck upright over the letter P, and
Peggy fingered them over listlessly. Delia Porter,
Helen Pearson, Margaret Perry and so on,
until all at once from the most inviting looking of
all leaped her own name, Peggy Parsons, in perfectly
unfamiliar writing—writing almost too assured
to be that of a freshman at all.

Wonderingly she unfolded the little square,
and then, jammed in by the other girls as she
was, she flung her arms around Katherine’s neck
and cried out with a sob of joy, “Oh, kiss me,
Katherine!—they want my poem for the *Monthly*!”

From dull gray the world leaped to glowing
radiance. For a freshman to be invited to give
a poem to the *Monthly*! Her great problem was
solved automatically, and Peggy would be an
author from that time forth until she should be
graduated.

.. File: 061.png

“Let’s see your note,” urged Katherine, when
they were out of the crowd once more. “I want
to look at it myself.”

Peggy eagerly unfolded the precious thing
again and read, while Katherine looked over her
shoulder:

  “*My dear Miss Parsons*—or wouldn’t it be
  more like college to say Peggy?—I’m writing to
  ask you if we may not have for the *Monthly* that
  little poem of yours that was read in Thirteen
  to-day? There are some changes in four of the
  lines, and if you’ll come over to my room this
  afternoon, I want you to make them yourself so
  that there will be as little as possible of my scribbling
  in it. Hoping to see you,
  
  .. class:: right
  
     | :sc:`Ditto Armandale`, *Monthly Board*,
     | :sc:`Room 11, Macefield House`.”

“Why, Peggy, do you remember that Ditto
Armandale we met that day last year while you
were standing under the waterfalls? And it was
the sight of her and all those other Hampton
girls that first made you want to come here!
Miss Armandale invited me to come and see her
that day, when I should get to Hamp, and she
said you were just the sort that ought to come
here—oh, isn’t it *fine*, Peggy!”

“Yes, but look here,” said Peggy, who was still
reading over her note, “she says ‘changes in four
of the lines.’ There were only four lines *in* it,
Katherine, you remember.”

“That’s queer. But I’d go anyway.”

“Of course I will,—I don’t suppose she’ll remember
me, but I’m glad she’s the one, she looked
so nice and considerate that day.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“It’s an invitation house. I suppose a person
ought to be awfully dressy,” Peggy said doubtfully.

“I don’t know,” murmured Katherine. “I
shouldn’t think it would be necessary to dress
much if you were just one of the multitude like
me. But being one of the youngest authors in
college, it’s different with you.”

With arms around each other’s shoulders, the
room-mates strolled back across the campus toward
Ambler House. The sunlight shone over
the campus and over the moving army of girls
going in every direction across it, for it was just
at the end of recitation hour. None of them
wore hats, so that the light gleamed down on
their hair. Most of them wore white sweaters
or sport coats, and under the arm of each was
tucked a notebook or a stack of study volumes.

All of them walked in pairs, as Katherine and
Peggy were doing, or in laughing groups that
gathered numbers as they went on.

Peggy and Katherine began to have an intimate
sense of belonging to it all. Hampton was
becoming *their* college in a way it had not been
before. This campus and those red brick buildings,
those laughing crowds of girls, their hair
blowing in the wind—these things were to represent
their whole world for four years, and,
tightening their hands on each other’s shoulders,
they were glad it was to be so.

And Peggy held crushed in her free hand a
tiny wad of paper, the tangible evidence that this
first year promised success to her.

.. File: 065.png

CHAPTER IV—NEW PAINT AND POETRY
===============================

A summons to visit an invitation house!

And on such a gratifying mission! Peggy
smiled as she slipped into her rose-colored taffeta,
and Katherine, watching her with pride, decided
that “the poet’s look” had come back.

“Well, good luck, room-mate,” she called as
Peggy went out the door, and she received one
radiant glance in answer from the departing
young bard.

The pleasantly warm tone of the rose-colored
taffeta buoyed up the new genius’ spirit all across
the campus until she came out into Green Street
and beheld the imposing reality of Macefield
House directly before her.

She had the fleeting and snobbish wish that
all the girls of her class could see her turning
thus assuredly up the walk to the famous senior
house. To be sure, she couldn’t help casting a
cold look of disapproval at the porch—it was the
messiest porch she had seen anywhere in Hampton,
but she supposed the celebrity inhabitants
of Macefield were all too busy with their dinners
and dances and social duties generally to notice
how careless and extremely—impromptu—the
approach to their home appeared.

The campus house porches all had chairs out
on them and comfortable magazine tables—there
were still a lot of hot fall days to look forward
to—but on the Macefield House porch there was
nothing. And somebody had carelessly left an
old ladder lying down right in front of the steps!
Peggy had a very hard time scrambling over it.
Perhaps it was just as well the other Freshman
girls weren’t there to see her after all. She must
admit there was considerable loss of dignity involved
in scrambling over an old paint-specked
ladder that was so completely in her way.

Her face was flushed to the color of her dress
when she finally climbed the steps. Even in her
confusion she noticed that the porch floor looked
strangely *new* and that it seemed to have a tendency
to cling a little and impede her footsteps.

“It’s probably because I’m getting scared that
I imagine my feet stick to the boards,” she mused
uncomfortably. “I don’t know how a person
should act at an invitation house. Whether
you’re supposed to walk right in or——”

That part of her problem was settled immediately,
for she found the door locked. Gathering
what self-confidence she could, she pressed the
bell.

Uneasily she shifted from one to the other of
the sticking feet. No one came. She knew it
was rude to ring twice, but she felt she would
never have the heart to come again if she didn’t
see the great editor of the Monthly now and get
everything arranged. So she pressed a shaking
finger nervously against the bell, and held it so
until she heard a rustling inside the house. The
door opened—just a crack—and a surprised head
poked itself into view. Peggy had a jumbled
and confused impression all at once. She was
aware of the speechless amazement in the eyes,
also that the face was not that of a girl at all,
but belonged to a rather severe looking and decidedly
middle-aged woman.

With a little jump of her heart she realized
that she was meeting the gaze of the matron of
Macefield House. Campus house matrons were
regarded in the light either of common enemies
or motherly souls, whose hearts responded to all
college-girls’ troubles. But what might the matron
of an invitation house be like? Peggy
thought she must be something incomparably
greater.

.. File: 069.png

“Is Miss Armandale in?” she asked weakly.

“She may be, but she’d be up in her room,”
answered the head ungraciously enough, while
its owner apparently did not intend to admit the
enemy within the fortifications, since no move
was made to open the door wider.

“Well——” murmured Peggy, with a sudden
realization that she was standing in wet paint,—“shall
I—go up—and—and find out?”

“By the back door if you wish,” said the head
witheringly. “If you came in this way, you’d
:sc:`Track in the Paint`.”

Peggy’s heart leaped. A crimson tide went
over her. She shut her eyes before the accusing
and indignant gaze of the matron.

So that was what the ladder had been for,
and any stupid but she would have known! With
dread she looked back along the porch the way
she had come and there, sure enough, was a procession
of marring footprints in the new grey
of the flooring!

She had climbed with great difficulty over the
barrier that had been deliberately placed there
to prevent such a thing.

And Ditto and the other girls of the house
would have to have the porch all done over on
account of a silly freshman. For the girls in the
invitation houses carried their own expenses,
leasing their houses and then conducting them
like any tenants.

“I will go ’round the back way, then,” she
gasped to the glowering matron. Her one thought
was to escape the baneful glare of those eyes.

Her feet stuck firmly when she tried to go and
as she was lifting them up with a generous accompaniment
of Macefield House paint, the door
banged behind her and she was left to make her
humiliating way back as she had come, with the
ladder to be surmounted again, and her eyes so
full of tears of embarrassment that she could
hardly see to walk.

She had no intention of going around the back
way. Her only desire was to get home.

She must face again the guns of the enemy—for
that wonderful poem mustn’t be lost to the
*Monthly*—but she would make her charge after
she had rested once more in the trenches of Suite
22, and had equipped her army of one with a new
uniform.

For that was the plan that was already taking
shape in her mind. She would return in disguise.
She had sallied forth in her brightest and best.
Well, she would go back as meek as a freshman
should, in plain clothes—and who would know
she was the young stupid who had scaled the step-ladder
and marred the new grey paint of the invitation
house?

“Well,” said Katherine, yawning up at her
lazily from the couch, when she was once more
within the home walls, “how did it go, room-mate?”

“How did what go?” inquired Peggy, kicking
off her pumps hastily and sliding them out of
sight, under the dressing table.

“Why, the interview with the great Ditto. You
make me tired, Peggy—acting just as though you
were bored by the best thing that’s happened to
either of us yet. And really and truly, you’re
just as glad as I am for you. Admit that you
are.”

“Not—so wildly,” Peggy made a little grimace,
as she flung the rose-colored silk dress into a corner.
A moment later her muffled voice came
from the bed room, where she was fumbling
among her dresses. “I never can find anything
I want.”

“Are you looking for your kimono? Going to
rest a while, before we get dressed for dinner?
Your kimono’s under the bed, Peggy; I saw the
blue edge sticking out. Hurry back in here and
tell me the news; I’m consumed with curiosity.”

Peggy came back into the study, wearing a
blue serge skirt, her head lost to view in a middy
blouse in the process of being slipped on. She
struggled to the top at last and peered out with
pleading eyes.

“Will you go over there with me, Katherine?”
she said in a tone she strove to make indifferent.

“Go over there with you? Haven’t you been?”

“I want your company,” Peggy stammered with
difficulty, unable to tell the fib that would have
been a direct answer to her room-mate’s question.

“Well,” said Katherine, getting up slowly and
stretching her arms, “I should say I will.”

And so Peggy, her army reinforced, began her
march on Macefield House a second time.

If Katherine was surprised at her simplified
costume, she made no comment, but held her arm
chummily all the way over, and Peggy felt that
victory was in sight.

“Look, they’ve painted their porch,” she said
in assumed surprise, when they came in sight
of the fateful ladder.

“So they have,” cried Katherine, “and we can’t
get up *that* way.”

And then she began to titter.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Peggy
quickly.

“Somebody—somebody—*did* go up anyway,”
Katherine laughed delightedly. “There are footprints
all over it! Oh, mustn’t the Macefield
House girls be furious?”

Peggy was silent.

“Don’t you think that’s funny?” her room-mate
insisted, still laughing.

“Perfectly *simple*,” returned Peggy. “Some
people haven’t a bit of sense. I imagine it was
some—some delivery boy, don’t you?”

.. File: 075.png

“More likely a freshman. Delivery boy with
those little feet? How ridiculous—as if he’d
wear high heels!”

“Katherine, you’re a regular Sherlock
Holmes,” Peggy protested.

“I believe I could ferret out the criminal,” persisted
Katherine. “I’ve thought of a good clue.”

“How would you do it?” Peggy’s voice was
little more than a whisper.

“Look on the bottoms of all the freshmen’s
shoes for paint,” announced her friend.

“Katherine!”

“Yes?”

“Last year you and I were detectives and we
found out things together, which did people good.
But do you think—after our partnership then,
it is right for you to go—looking things up all
by yourself without me, now?”

“How perfectly silly of you,” laughed Katherine;
“of course you’d have to help. You could
look at the shoes of the girls on one side of the
campus, and I’d take our side. Anyway it’s all
in fun. I suppose we’d better go around the back
way, don’t you think so?”

Peggy thought so, decidedly. In a few moments
they were climbing the dark back stairs
to the room of the great *Monthly* editor on the
second floor.

The door of Number 11 stood part way open
and showed a delightful and luxurious confusion
within. Peggy and Katherine got a glimpse
of tall red roses, Oriental couch cover, and a profusion
of pillows, old bronze bric-a-brac, green
leather banners, scattered books and manuscripts,
with the inevitable Mona Lisa enigmatically smiling
down at it all from the opposite wall of the
room.

Peggy and Katherine, after a light knock, advanced
into the room and seated themselves on
the inviting couch.

.. File: 077.png

“A book-case and a dictionary,” murmured
Peggy. “Such funny things to have at college.”

“But there’s a tea table, too,” reminded Katherine.
“In fact, I never saw a room that had such
a varied assortment of things—and all in harmony.”

“I like that leather peacock screen,” Peggy
went on.

“Oh, I love it all—but don’t you think it’s the
least bit oppressive? That incense smell lulls my
senses to sleep. I don’t see how Ditto can be the
fresh, breezy sort she is,—perfectly matter-of-fact
and everydayish,—and live in an opium den
of a room like this.”

“It isn’t just what her character would lead
you to expect,” admitted Peggy.

Just then, a girl drifting aimlessly by in the hall
paused at the door, and glanced in curiously at
the two freshmen sitting so stiffly, toes out, hands
clasped in their laps, awaiting the all-important
Ditto.

“Dit know you’re here?” she asked, with
friendly brevity.

Both girls shook their heads.

“I’ll get her,” said the other, disappearing, and
an instant later they heard, up and down the hall,
the loud cry, “:sc:`Dit-to! Di-i-t Armandale`!
Somebody to see you!”

From the third floor came a scrambling noise,
then the sound of light feet tapping on the stairs.

“Well, you really did come, you children,”
gasped the owner of the room, coming in flushed
from her hasty descent and blowing a wavy
strand of golden hair from her face.

She plumped down between them on the couch
and looked from one to the other with an air of
delighted proprietorship.

“And you’re beginning just right, too, as
I knew you would. Thirteen is the open road to
glory, here, and you certainly were courageous,
handing in a poem first thing.”

Her hand reached for Peggy’s knee. “How do
you like everything, now you’re here, and why
haven’t you been over before?”

“We didn’t think you’d remember us,” said
Peggy.

“There was so much water that day you saw
us, at the picnic last year——”

Ditto threw back her head and laughed. “Yes,
there was plenty of that,” she agreed. “I never
saw anything so moist as you were. And you—Katherine
Foster—yes, I remember your names,
too,—I chose you for a friend of mine that day.
And I’m positively insulted that neither of you
accepted my invitation to come to see me, until
I dragged you here on business. Your poem,
Peggy,—here it is, I kept it out for you——”

She had risen and lifted the blue-folded paper
from a pile of thick stories and “heavies” on the
table. And Peggy, watching the nonchalant way
she handled the sacred *Monthly* material, felt her
admiration increasing.

“Now,” said Ditto, bending over the page with
complete concentration, “let’s see just what we
want to do—I thought that possibly——”

And her sturdy little blue pencil crept mercilessly
through word after word, while Peggy felt
the blood pounding into her face and tried not
to mind the kindly criticism of her effort.

Peggy was consulted tactfully about each
change and asked for suggestions, until, under the
skilful guidance of the more experienced writer,
the fledgling really developed a verse that would
not mar the *Monthly* pages. Then Ditto gave her
a pen and some paper to write it all out again, in
the copy that was actually to go to the printer.

Katherine talked to Ditto about her room-mate,
while the latter was carefully rewriting her masterpiece.

.. File: 081.png

“You know you’ve got good material for freshman
president, there,” said Ditto with something
of senior condescension. “An Andrews girl usually
has it, and she’s the right type. She isn’t
very self-conscious, she’s lots of fun and ready
for anything. You can tell that. Why don’t you
put her up? Your elections are this week, aren’t
they? Honestly, I’ve heard of nothing but Peggy
Parsons, Peggy Parsons, from all the freshmen
protégées of the girls in this house.”

Katherine caught fire. “It would be great,”
she said. “Think of rooming with the class president.
Oh, I did a clever thing in bringing her to
Hampton. I can shine in reflected glory through
the whole four years.”

“You do it,” urged Ditto, “get her elected, I
mean. I’ll help.”

She nodded carelessly toward the huge vase
of roses. “I have quite a few little freshmen
friends whom I’ll—tell about Peggy.”

.. File: 082.png

When Peggy handed back the poem with a rueful
smile at its many changes, Katherine got up
from the couch and took her room-mate’s arm.
It would never do to linger, though it was hard
to leave the great Presence.

Peggy’s look as they left the house held simply
pleasure and gratitude, but Katherine’s brimmed
with meaning.

“You don’t know what I know,” she hummed.

“Then why not tell me?” laughed Peggy.

“I know who’s going to be freshman president!”

“Who?”

“Shan’t tell you—but I suppose you’ll find out
when it happens.”

“Well,” retorted Peggy unexpectedly, “I know
already.”

“What’s—her—name?” gasped Katherine.

“Gloria Hazeltine,” answered Peggy.

Katherine stopped and caught her shoulders.
Facing her, she studied her calm expression of
certainty.

“Why, Peggy,” she couldn’t help saying, “it
was going to be _you_, and I was going to start
this very day to campaign for you.”

“Me!” scoffed Peggy. “I couldn’t even *look*
like a president. The freshman president stands
for the whole class, and the sophs and juniors
and seniors are apt to judge us a good deal by
the one we choose for that office. They’d think
what flyaways the freshmen are if you had any
one like me. Or rather they’d never notice us
at all, but would sever diplomatic relations. But
Gloria now——”

The vision of the tall, radiant young Westerner,
with her red-gold hair and her wide, laughing,
blue eyes—the way she talked, the way she
wore her clothes, her charm and sincerity of manner—rose
vividly in Katherine’s mind. She compared
this vision with the actual striking little
figure of her room-mate, with the flickering dimples
showing and disappearing and the warm light
that always lay in the depths of her black eyes.

“I—don’t—know,” she said honestly. “Gloria
is wonderful—but you, Peggy, you’re so dear.”

“I’ll give all I have to the class,” cried Peggy,
opening her arms, as if to embrace every girl of
the four hundred and fifty freshmen, “but I don’t
have to be set up in the post of honor to do it.”

“But Andrews usually has the presidency,”
ventured Katherine in a troubled tone. “Ditto
Armandale reminded me that our school has always
carried off everything, Freshman year. It’s
*expected*.”

“We’re not Andrews now, we’re Hampton,”
said Peggy gravely. “Don’t you remember the
signs in the moving picture shows, from Wilson’s
proclamation? Something about ‘whatever country
you came from, you are an American now.’”

“Well, the president-elect is dead, long live the
president-elect,” capitulated Katherine reluctantly.

“Good. I really feel that I owe her an awful
lot for taking you away from her,” smiled Peggy,
grown light-hearted once more. “Being president
wouldn’t half make up.”

Katherine laughed her gratified surprise and
began to plan how to draw the solid Andrews
vote, in favor of a girl who was not from Andrews.

“I’m going to have a party for Gloria,” Peggy
mused, “and invite every single freshman in the
catalogue. You’ll have to help me write the notes
to stick up on the bulletin board. And we’ll say,
‘To meet the freshman class president,’ and freshmen
are such sheep, they’ll think she’s as good as
elected.”

“Sheep yourself,” flared Katherine. “I think
putting anything like that in would be terribly
crude. But the rest of the plan I like.”

.. File: 086.png

“And I’ll dress in my very best and make an
impression for her sake,” Peggy went on, thinking
aloud.

“Wear that rose-colored dress and those cute
pumps,” suggested Katherine, interestedly.

“No, *not* the rose-colored dress, and *not* the
pumps,” Peggy returned with a slight shiver.

The first thing she did, when they reached their
room, was to drag the pumps from their hiding
place and wrap them carefully in a sheet of newspaper.

“What in the world——?” began Katherine.

“I’m—I’m going to take them to be resoled,”
murmured Peggy hastily.

.. File: 087.png

CHAPTER V—MORNING GLORY
=======================

Freshman elections began with a babble.

Everywhere the insistent voices of the lobbyists
were heard. Upper-class girls had come in to
impress the freshmen as to the proper name to
write on the voting slips.

“She’s a *dandy* girl,” was shouted confidentially
into Peggy’s ears so many times, while she
didn’t know *who* was nor *why* she was, that she
couldn’t help having a high opinion of her class
altogether. Every girl in it seemed to be “dandy”
in somebody’s judgment.

“Will you vote for Myra Whitewell?” some
friend was imploring.

“No,” said Peggy, suddenly, “let me alone.
Every one is after me so hard to vote for other
people that I haven’t had any time to work for
my own candidate.”

And she forced her way through the throng,
shouting into each bewildered and crimson ear,
“Vote for Gloria Hazeltine! She’s a *dandy* girl.”

“Peggy, *Peggy*, listen a moment,” said Katherine’s
agonized voice. “What do you think the
Andrews girls are doing? Going back on us at
the last minute. They say they will put up Florence
Thomas for president if neither of us will
run, and that you and I are traitors to try to elect
some one not from our own prep school.”

“Well,” said Peggy, gritting her teeth, “we
can elect Gloria without Andrews.”

“Oh, but, Peggy, we will be voting against our
own school! If they insist on putting her up this
way, won’t we have to vote for Florence?”

Peggy shook her head and went on through the
thick crowds of freshmen. “She’s a *dandy* girl,”
Katherine heard in Peggy’s clear tones.

.. File: 089.png

Here in this giant recitation room was assembled
a class in the process of being welded together
into an organization having one heart and
one mind. It was a conglomeration of more or
less uncertain and dazed girls now. Some were
actively working up sentiment, but for the most
part they stood in groups, each group a stranger
to the others, four hundred and fifty girls, many
of whom had never seen each other before this
day, trying to realize that they were of one college
flesh and that out of this roomful must be
made the dearest friendships of a lifetime.

There was nothing coherent about them as yet.
They held aloof from each other, partly in timidity
and partly in pride, and their interests were in
conflict rather than in unison.

Once pledged to a name for president, they
clung to it desperately as if that particular girl
had been their best and oldest friend. And they
hated all the other girls who had been put up.

.. File: 090.png

Slips of paper were passed around and, with
a feeling of deep importance, each freshman
wrote the name of the girl she wanted for her
president.

With much rustling the slips were collected in
hats by freshmen appointed by the pretty Junior
who presided.

Then with more rustling they were counted,
while the freshmen’s eyes popped out of their
heads in eagerness to learn how good a showing
their favorite was making.

The silence was most respectful when the pretty
Junior took up the counts the freshmen had made
and read in her sweet, serious voice, “Myra
Whitewell 200, Gloria Hazeltine 101, Florence
Thomas 99, Corinne Adams 50.”

The ignorant freshmen remained breathless,
waiting to be told whether any one was yet their
president or not.

“It is necessary, according to the by-laws, to
have a two-thirds majority for a candidate before
she can receive office,” the presiding Junior informed
them in those dainty and precise tones of
hers. “Therefore another vote will be cast, in
the hope of bringing about more unanimity.”

With joy the freshmen wrote again on slips of
paper. But the vote came in again identically
the same! The pretty Junior, whose name was
Alta Perry, raised her eye-brows in surprise.
Tirelessly the appointed freshmen passed out new
voting slips.

“When a candidate has too few votes to be
really in the running,” protested the Junior mildly,
“the voting would get on faster to give those
votes elsewhere. The idea is not to show your
loyalty to any one girl, but to elect a president
for the freshman class.”

Peggy took council with her henchman, Katherine.

“If those Adams votes go to Florence Thomas,
I suppose Gloria will be sacrificed sooner or later,”
she said. “If they go to Myra Whitewell—I
think she’s the haughty little thing yonder wearing
the Mrs. Castle head-ache band,—why, then
Gloria’s out, too. The only thing to do is to get
them for Gloria.”

She sped away to the Andrews group, where
Florence Thomas, who had always taken life
pleasantly and coolly, was the flushed and eager
center of ninety-nine supporters, both those from
her own school and the others who had rallied to
her cause.

“Girls,” said Peggy, “we’re two ahead of you.
Please be reasonable——”

But she saw the curious star-like quality of
Florence’s eyes. And she hadn’t the heart to
go on.

The plain, kindly, everyday, comfy Florence to
light up and shine like that! Well, if she had
known in time how honors could bring that girl
out, perhaps Peggy would have considered her
a perfectly suitable president from the beginning.

“If *you* had wanted it, Peggy, I wouldn’t have
stood a chance,” Florence breathed down to her
from the window seat on which she was perched
so as to overlook her adherents. “The girls only
put me up because you and Katherine failed
them.”

Failed them! Peggy’s heart skipped a beat.
The cold glances of the other girls let her guess
only too plainly how she was viewed by the Andrews
contingent, the members of her own school.

“If you give up something that most anybody
would want and feel just right about it, then
somebody comes and takes the joy out of life by
seeing you as a villain still,” mused Peggy aloud.

She didn’t try to get the Corinne Adams votes
for Gloria, she didn’t argue with a single Myra
Whitewell enthusiast.

And the vote came in again so nearly the same
that the pretty Junior was vexed, and looked at
her wrist watch and thence out to the waning
sunlight over the campus. Really an afternoon
spent with her own somewhat intelligent juniors
would be greatly preferable to this monotonous
and stubborn concourse of freshmen who seemed
to have set their hearts on making an election
impossible. Corinne Adams had lost seven votes
to Myra, and now tragically arose and announced
her withdrawal from the contest. Many
voices murmured protestingly “no, no,” as she
came forward and went toward the door, but
these sympathizers had not voted for her when
they had the chance.

“I never knew anything so heart-breakingly
mixed up,” said Peggy. “That Junior’s mad, the
freshmen are near to tears and the candidates are
all wobbly.”

And then suddenly an idea lifted her right
up out of the depression and doubt that was settling
over the room. She stepped over to the desk
and held a confab with the Junior and the freshmen
vote-collectors.

Alta Perry snatched eagerly at the chance to
bring order out of chaos.

She arose and rapped for attention. Immediately
all the despairing whispers ceased.

“Some one has suggested that the girls would
like to see the candidates,” she said, “so that
they’d know who they’re voting for.”

A wave of approval swept her audience.

“So I’ll ask the girls who are still up to come
forward to the platform so that—everybody may
see them.”

The crowd parted, while from three corners
of the room the candidates came.

The Junior smiled apologetically as she ranged
them before the class. This was vastly amusing
to her, but she realized that all the voters were
staring forward with hero-worship in their eyes
waiting to see which was the girl for whom each
had been so religiously voting, ballot after ballot.

“Myra Whitewell,” introduced Alta Perry,
nodding toward the first girl.

The girl acknowledged the introduction with
an abrupt lifting of her chin. She was small and
dark, with snapping brown eyes and a fine,
slender, somewhat selfish face with no color in it.
Her lips were full and red.

A pretty, wilful, egotistical picture this first
candidate presented to the freshman class. Myra
was the sort of girl who would always have
blindly devoted followers willing to put up with
her whims and ill-tempers because they believed
her to be of finer clay than the rest of the world.

She herself was superbly conscious of this extra
fineness. She scanned the eager faces of the
crowd with quick glances, haughty, like a young
princess reviewing her humble but faithful subjects.

.. File: 097.png

“And this is Florence Thomas,” continued the
Junior, her eyes sparkling just a bit with the fun
of the little drama.

And the class saw Florence Thomas for just
what she was—a nice, ordinary, typical girl like
most of them; possessed of a good deal of executive
ability if it was forced into action, neither
markedly self-centered nor self-sacrificing.

She had a little round face, with wavy dark-brown
hair around it. They got no very distinct
impression of the second candidate further than
this. She was without the rare gift of personality
that “gets across,” and hence her undoubted,
sterling qualities had little opportunity for appeal.

Her face was flushed with her sudden prominence,
and there was a trace of embarrassment in
her smile.

Peggy’s thought raced back over Florence’s
characteristics while at Andrews. Florence was
just the type to have an important place in a small
school, where each individual girl could get to
know her and love her. But here among these
hundreds there was nothing about her striking
enough to hold their attention at first glance.

A warm feeling of affection surged up in
Peggy’s heart for her last year’s comrade.

Just for a moment she would have forced
Florence down their throats whether or not, if
she could, without regard for the fact that she
believed another girl was infinitely better fitted
for the post.

That other girl’s name was now being spoken
by the Junior.

“This is Gloria Hazeltine,” she announced to
the monster class.

And just as the moon and stars fade out of
view when the sun comes up, so the less vivid attraction
of Myra and Florence dimmed into insignificance
beside the appealing radiance that
was Gloria’s.

.. File: 099.png

“O-oh, isn’t she sweet!” breathed a girl near
Peggy. “I never saw anything like that hair in
my life. For goodness’ sake, somebody lend me
a knife to sharpen my pencil so that I can vote all
over again for her!”

If she were nothing besides sweet, argued
Peggy to herself, she would never have been put
up. Most of the girls were that. But she understood
that the rapturous tribute of her neighbor
meant far more than the words she had chosen.

The quality of graceful and unconscious leadership
seemed stamped in Gloria’s face, as she
smiled out on the freshmen, who were all beginning
to go wild over her at once.

The slips were passed again while the three
candidates faced their different constituents.

All anxiety had passed from Peggy’s mind.
She was *sure* who had won.

The slips rustled triumphantly when they had
been sorted after the voting and were passed
up to the Junior again.

“Twenty for Florence Thomas,” she read aloud
without raising her eyes from the papers. “Fifty
for Myra Whitewell, and—all the rest for Gloria
Hazeltine—Miss Hazeltine is elected president
of your class!”

With that announcement something happened
to the class. Instantaneously the fusion took
place.

There were no longer separate groups, shy and
a little suspicious of each other: they were one
class. They had elected a president. She was
the president of all alike.

At the same instant they all burst forth into
the same song:

   | “Oh, here’s to Morning Glory,
   | Drink her down!
   | Oh, here’s to Morning Glory,
   | Drink her down!
   | Oh, here’s to Morning Glory,
   | Whom we’ll love till we are hoary;
   | Drink her down, drink her down,
   | Drink her down, DOWN, down!
   | Balm of Gilead, Gilead,
   | Balm—:sc:`Of—Gilead`—
   | Way down on the Bingo Farm!”

And then they turned and looked at each other
with wonder, for the little rhyme in the middle
had come with unanimous harmony to all, and
each had sung this cheer song just as loudly as
she could, although a few minutes before many
would have said they didn’t even know the tune.

Peggy was thrilled to her finger tips. She
squeezed Katherine’s arm. Gloria’s beauty and
ability had been enhanced twenty fold, for every
girl present, by this spontaneous tribute. And
Peggy could think of nothing more desirable in
the world than that she should some time hear
this song laden with her own name.

The other officers were elected with expedition,
the vice-presidency being offered to Myra Whitewell,
who indignantly refused it, declaring she
would be first or nothing—thus maintaining a
single discordant note in the general happiness
and good humor. The despised office was then
hesitatingly tendered to Florence Thomas, who
was almost too pleased to speak, but made the
remark in acceptance that this office, while still
too big for her, was nearer her size and she’d do
just everything she could to deserve their trust
and faith in her.

Myra Whitewell edged her way out of the
room, with a slight sneer distorting her pretty
lips.

But Florence shook hands with all who came
forward and received their kisses with pleasure
that made every one love her.

The class went singing home in every direction
from its election. An enormous hysterically
happy crowd flocked in the wake of Gloria.
Peggy and Katherine were in the outskirts of this
crowd, and they looked from the heroine of their
making into each other’s radiant faces.

“Well, thank goodness, her looks elected her,”
sighed Peggy thankfully. “As soon as I thought
of a ‘seeing is believing’ test, I knew we’d won.”

“All the girls are saying she’s the prettiest
president a freshman class ever had,” laughed
Katherine, “and the joke on them is that they
have a regular person as well as just a beauty.”

“We’ve certainly done our duty by the class,”
agreed Peggy.

Katherine turned and looked consideringly at
her room-mate.

“You *know*, Peggy, that you could have been
the center of that crowd this minute, if you had
wanted to. Dit Armandale did a good deal to
work up sentiment and—you are the best known
freshman of any—or were an hour or so ago. I
think you’d have been just as good a president
as Gloria,—and if I do say it myself, a lot better
even—and—and just as pretty——”

“No matter who you room with,” trilled Peggy
remindingly and ungrammatically, “you’re for
Hampton now.”

“That Wilson idea again?”

“The very same.”

“:sc:`Well`, anyway, Peggy, you *could*——”

“Don’t!” said Peggy suddenly and almost
sharply. “Do you think I am some kind of
*angel*?”

“Ye-es,” drawled Katherine affectionately
with a slow smile, “sort of.”

But Peggy looked away from her laughing
eyes, and shook her head quickly as if she expected
to shake out of it some unwelcome thought.

Later in the day—just before dinner time, she
and Katherine gathered in the quantities of notes
and invitations that had come to Gloria and Florence
Thomas. It seemed that every girl in college, no matter
what class she was in, had taken
immediate occasion to sit down and write her
congratulations to the freshman president.

When they stopped to deliver their burden at
Gloria’s door, they found her room fragrant with
American beauty roses, and sweet with violets
and spicy with pink carnations. A huge orchid
nodded coolly in a Japanese vase which the girls
had never seen before, and an array of dainty
little leather-covered books on every subject from
“Friendship” to “Ibsen” were strewn on the table
by the window.

Three new pictures in black walnut frames
stood leaning against the couch with the waiting
picture wire beside them.

Gloria came to meet them, flushed with pleasure.

“Oh, I never knew it would be like this,” she
exclaimed, quite frank in her delight. “And
what have you brought me? Oh, so many notes—aren’t
they all *dear*? I didn’t imagine college—or
anything—could be so nice.”

She sat down on the couch while Katherine and
Peggy poured their harvest of congratulations
into her lap. Her fingers felt them over and
sifted them before she unfolded any, and she
looked up to laugh her happiness into her friends’
eyes.

“Your room looks wonderful,” breathed Katherine,
looking around, “just like a senior’s, all of
a sudden.”

“Doesn’t it?” echoed Gloria. “I’ve solved the
mystery of Ditto Armandale’s room seeming so
unlike her, as you said it did,—her furnishings
are all gifts from people for getting elected to
things.”

Two dimples of satisfaction dented Peggy’s
piquant little face. She ached from head to foot
from the hours of standing and of forcing her
way back and forth through the crowds while
she made her brief campaign appeals. But it had
turned out wonderfully. Her candidate had won,
and was this same radiant and beautiful Gloria
looking so joyously at her now.

“Listen to this,” Gloria was saying, reading
one of the tributes from the note-room; “this is a
darling one:

  “‘*Dear First Lady of the Freshmen*:
  
  “‘Please allow an old, old Junior to express
  her joy over you and her envy of you. Once a
  long time ago—two whole years—she herself
  heard the Balm of Gilead song in honor of her
  own election to the heights you have attained to-day.
  
  “‘I don’t think I ever felt so lofty over anything.
  And all the college experiences that have
  come since have never dimmed the thrilling feeling
  of that day or made it seem one bit less the
  best thing that ever happened to me.
  
  “‘But I was afraid as well as glad: afraid that
  maybe I wouldn’t know how to do everything just
  as I should and that I might in some way disappoint
  the girls who were mentally carrying me
  about on their shoulders. In case you ever feel
  that way, little First Lady—and this is the
  reason for my note being written—I want you to
  know that you’ll be very welcome to come to the
  veteran—and get the advice or bolstering up she
  may be able to give you as a result of having
  learned from her own mistakes.
  
  “‘Remember the juniors are just in college
  to be big sisters to the freshmen, and I hope you
  will come and claim the relationship the first free
  minute you have.
  
  .. class:: right
  
     | “‘Love and congratulations,
     | “‘:sc:`Mary Marvington`.’”

“Oh,” said Peggy, clasping her knees, “isn’t
that a lovely one?”

“Well, it’s hard to realize that you are one of
the great ones, now, Morning Glory,” sighed
Katherine whimsically, “so that even ex-presidents
will be flattered when you go to see them.
And the condescension is all yours! Because a
brand new freshman president is more in the college
public eye than an ‘old’ junior who used to
be once what you are now.”

“Great ones,” Gloria was repeating to herself.

.. File: 109.png

“Do you suppose I really am?” she asked artlessly.

“Yes, you are,” Katherine said. “A few hours
ago you weren’t half as much as Peggy—and
didn’t have the outlook she had, but now——”

Peggy and Gloria simultaneously clapped their
hands over Katherine’s mouth, and in her quick
movement Gloria’s mass of folded notes scattered
over the floor like a sudden storm of Luther Burbank
snow-flakes.

When they had gathered these together
again and had helped Gloria sort out the most
interesting-looking ones to read first, they each
kissed her and went home, leaving her well absorbed
in her overwhelming correspondence before
they were even out of sight.

There was a reception in honor of the officers
that evening in the Students’ building. The
freshmen were tired from their strenuous day,
but they looked charming, nevertheless, in their
soft silks and batistes as they drifted down the
walk to the scene of festivities.

“There’s Peggy Parsons!” a cry went up as
soon as the pair from Suite 22, Ambler House,
entered the building.

Peggy was immediately surrounded and borne
off toward the receiving line, down which she was
marched with nearly all the Andrews crowd and
ever so many others in her wake. It did her heart
good to hear every Andrews girl telling Gloria
Hazeltine that each had voted for her from the
beginning—and they believed it, the happy enthusiasts,
Peggy could see that.

Then Peggy was swept on by the mob and was
soon in the middle of a seethe of dancers, all girls,
fox-trotting, one-stepping, waltzing and bumping
into each other in brilliant lavender, pink, blue
and white confusion. How many dances she
danced, nor what they were, she never could remember
afterwards. For as soon as one girl left
her another carried her off; juniors, seniors,
sophomores and freshmen, she couldn’t tell
which. But every one knew her name and hailed
her as Peggy as if they had known her all their
lives.

“I never knew anything so funny,” she said,
when she was limping home later, with Katherine
in the moonlight. “It was just all a kaleidoscope.
I feel a good deal like a moving-picture that has
been run too fast.”

“I think you were the director of the picture,”
smiled Katherine, glancing affectionately at her
dishevelled room-mate. “You wrote the scenario
for the election, and directed it, even if you did
have to be in the picture yourself.”

“Katherine, you’ve got an awfully horrid
room-mate,” mused Peggy in answer to this
eulogy.

“I’ve got Peggy Parsons,” Katherine refuted.

“Well, she’s the one I mean,” Peggy laughed.

.. File: 112.png

“You’d be ashamed of her if you knew. Katherine,
what do you think I almost wished when
we were taking all those notes over to Gloria?”

“It wouldn’t be so strange if you’d realized
they might all have been for you,” Katherine
defended her. “They might, you know. It was
just your crazy generosity that gave them up and
deprived me of rooming with a freshman president.
Did you really wish you were president?
I hope you *did*, because if you didn’t you’re more
than human and I don’t like such people.”

“There!” cried Peggy, abruptly stopping in
her homeward limp, and throwing her arms
around her room-mate’s neck, “I’m not half so
ashamed of it now that it’s been dragged out
into the light of day—the light of moon, I mean.
It’s funny how much better it makes a person feel
to confess something mean and be sympathized
with for it.”

“Anyway,” said Katherine, as their tired feet
climbed the steps of their house, “you were the
*dea ex machina*, Peggy Parsons.”

“The—the what?” demanded Peggy, startled.
“Oh, it’s mean to spring anything like that on a
trusting room-mate who hasn’t any Latin dictionary
along. I’ll be driven to using a trot for
your remarks, if you keep on.”

Their laughs rang out inside the huge dimly
lighted hall, and the matron, in curl-papers and
a purple wrapper, strode forth from her room
noiselessly and confronted the culprits.

“Hush, hush,” she said. “At this time of
night! Please go up to your room without any
more of this unseemly laughter.”

“Yessum, yessum,” whispered Katherine and
Peggy meekly, and together they stole up the
broad stairway to their rooms, where they
snapped on the light and looked at each other
and laughed again—but this time silently.

.. File: 114.png

CHAPTER VI—AS OTHERS SEE US
===========================

Bang! Bang!

“My-y goo-oodness, is it time to get up?”
Katherine sat up sleepily the morning after the
freshmen officers’ reception, and tried to get some
response from the little log-like Peggy in the
bed across the room. But Peggy’s face was toward
the wall and she presented a perfect picture
of deep sleep.

The banging continued and Katherine felt it
incumbent upon her to locate it. Gertie Van
Gorder, who had kindly taken upon herself the
task of waking up the entire second floor at
whatever hours its individual inhabitants specified,
never thumped like that. She always came
quietly in and laid icy cold wet wash cloths over
their faces, and informed them calmly, “Your
tub is ready, girls; I’ve left my violet ammonia
in there for you.”

So it wasn’t Gertie.

“Peggy,” yawned Katherine fretfully, “can’t
you wake up and help me think what that is?”

But Peggy, accustomed to so much more efficient
means of awakening, never stirred.

“Come in,” invited Katherine unwillingly and
experimentally to the banging, and Hazel Pilcher
entered, with Myra Whitewell in her wake.

“Lazy!” cried Hazel. “You’ve missed breakfast!”

Katherine moaned and hunched her shoulders
in her pink-ribboned nightgown. “What’s become
of Gertie?” she demanded. “We can’t
wake up by ourselves, can we?”

“Gertie’s in Boston; didn’t you know? Went
for the week-end,” and Hazel sat down on the
foot of the sleeping Peggy’s couch and laughed
until she was hoarse. “Now that just shows that
what Myra and I are getting up is a real necessity,”
she giggled. “If there wasn’t a crack o’
doom of some kind, I suppose the whole second
floor of Ambler House would snooze right
through the three days until Gertie gets back.
It’s—it’s ludicrous,” she finished, after fishing
around for a good word.

“You’re sitting on Peggy,” pointed out Katherine
lackadaisically when the laughter of her
guests had died down.

“Wake up, Peggy,” cried Hazel, shaking the
rounded shoulder. “Wake up and quit being sat
on.”

“You spoke of a plan,” drawled Katherine,
when all had seen that the only effect on Peggy
was a tossing of her golden curls on the pillow.
“Was it something to take Gertie’s place? If it
were, I don’t think anything could; Gertie will
get up at any hour to call us, and says she likes
it, too. I’m too loyal to Gertie——”

“Nonsense,” snapped Myra Whitewell, who
had not forgotten that one of the room-mates
had been largely instrumental in electing her opponent
at elections the day before. “This is a
fault party that we’re going to have to-night, in
Hazel’s room. Just freshmen, except Hazel.
You two must be sure to come.”

“A fault party?”

“Yes, every house ought to have one. Hazel
says this house did last year. Each person tells
the others their faults, you know, and then we
can improve. Everybody is very frank and it
really is good for you to know.”

Myra glanced somewhat bitterly at the inattentive
form of Peggy, and Katherine hastily
turned a little surprised laugh into a sneeze.

“Oh, so she wants to tell Peggy her faults,”
mused Katherine. “Peggy of all people! Why,
she hasn’t any.”

“I don’t want to come,” a muffled voice came
from the erstwhile sleeper. “It hurts people’s
feelings.”

“It shouldn’t,” interposed Myra sharply. “If
it does, *that’s* a fault, and somebody can bring
up that. Everybody ought to be glad to know
what’s the matter with them. Why, the idea!”
she burst out, “there isn’t one of us who hasn’t
seen something to correct in the others, and instead
of just keeping it to ourselves and being
hypocrites, isn’t it a thousand times better to
tell the person right out?”

“I don’t think the person would like that,”
the muffled voice protested.

“Well, all the freshmen must come,” Myra persisted.
“Come at nine-thirty to-night, in case
we don’t have another chance to tell you.”

“That’s a funny thing,” said Peggy, rubbing
her eyes when the two had gone. “Do you know
any faults of any of the girls, Katherine? I
don’t. Let’s see, there are eight freshmen in this
house altogether,—and Hazel taking part makes
nine. Why, Katherine, I think we have wonderful
people here.”

“That part won’t matter so much,” hinted the
wise Katherine. “They want to do the telling,
I think.”

“I’ll watch the girls all day whenever I’m not
at class, and if I see anything the matter with
any of them, I’ll have something to report on.”

“I know some for Myra myself.”

“Some way I hadn’t thought of that,” answered
Peggy. “I believe I do, too. But here’s
a good idea, Katherine,—you and I live together,
and did all last year, and we ought to know *slews*
of faults about each other. So when we are
called on we can just show each other up at a
great rate—drag each other out to be ridiculed”—Peggy
rocked in bed with the merriment of the
thought. “We can make up the most wild faults
of all, and please everybody,” she laughed.

“You wouldn’t be gloating over foolish things
like that if you knew we’d missed breakfast,”
interrupted Katherine. “And, my goodness,
woman, there’s the chapel bell!”

The room was a confusion of flying clothes,
waving hair-brushes and dodging figures, for
some ten minutes thereafter. Then the pink and
white cretonne bed covers were smoothed quickly
over two couches that had each been made up in
a single swooping motion, including sheet, blankets,
comforter and all. The fat pillows were
stuffed into their cretonne covers and thrown at
the head of the beds, and then two well-dressed,
well-groomed appearing girls, with their notebooks
under their arms, emerged and tore down
the broad stairway, flying across the campus
lawn, just in time to be shut out of chapel, while
the first welling notes of the organ came out to
them, as they stood panting at the door.

“You know that girl down the hall who keeps
saying ‘all things work together for good,’” said
Katherine. “Well——”

“What do you mean?” asked Peggy, but she
had already cast one fleeting glance towards the
Copper Kettle just outside the campus.

“It’s just a question of whether we can get
breakfast in twenty minutes and be in time for
our first class,” went on Katherine. “And I’m
starved, and I—don’t mind having missed chapel,
after all. That’s what I mean.”

Laughing, Peggy caught her arm and the two
took a short cut out of campus and across the
road to the little tea room.

“Nothing is served till nine o’clock,” they were
informed, for provision was made against just
such a feeling as Katherine had expressed. The
two ran around the corner to the nearest drug
store, and regaled themselves with two egg chocolates
each.

“Goodness,” murmured Peggy on their way
back to recitation, “I certainly wish Gertie were
back, bless her heart. If anybody at the meeting
to-night finds any fault with *her*, while she’s
away, they’ll have me to deal with.”

But when the freshmen were assembled that
evening, no word was said against Gertie, nor
was her name so much as mentioned, for there
is little satisfaction in scoring an absent friend,
when you have just received license to make a
present one squirm.

Two candles were lit in Hazel’s rose-and-old-blue
room. There was no other light. On the
couch and here and there about on the floor sat
the Ambler freshmen, in silk kimonos of Japanese
or French design. Florence Thomas was
wearing a pale blue with big gold dragons,
Peggy noticed as soon as she came in, for the
candle light flickered over it, and the dull gold
threads gleamed.

Myra’s kimono was of midnight blue crepe de
chine without any relieving color tone whatever.
Her face shone above it more pale and proud
than usual.

“The reason we are here,” began Myra, rising
and standing gracefully before them, with
her dark eyes taking in every one of the group,
“is to see if we can’t be of some help to each
other in weeding out the most glaring faults of
the Ambler House freshmen. Hazel is here as a
sort of referee, and each girl is to tell—quite
without reservation—any criticisms she may have
for the rest of us. Now begin, somebody.”

She sat down again with a little silken rustle,
and Florence Thomas leaned forward, her pleasant
face serious with the weight of her self-imposed
task.

“There’s one thing I’ve noticed,” she said
slowly. “Doris Winterbean and May Jenson
don’t seem to mingle with the rest of the house
as they might. Now I don’t want you two girls
to get mad,” turning to her victims, “but you
have an awfully ungracious air when any one
comes to your door, and you always lay a book
face down as if you could hardly wait to take
it up again. You aren’t exactly snobs,—maybe
it’s only that you’re too studious. You never
have any eats in your room, and yet you are always
going to call on other people when you hear
they have. And that’s about the only way any
of us can entice you into our rooms——”

Doris and May wilted perceptibly under this
attack, and their mouths opened in astonishment
to see the way they had been impressing these
girls whom they had supposed were their generous
friends. But instead of making them more
gentle when it came their turn to uncover faults,
they threw discretion to the winds, and heaped
up accusations, forgetting that another morning
was coming and they must go on living among
these girls throughout the year.

The atmosphere of friendship which prevailed
when the girls arrived in Hazel’s room, was
changed now to one of animosity.

One after another, the girls criticized each
other’s gowns, table manners and personality.
Each new victim of attack blanched, drew a sharp
breath of horror and surprise to see in what esteem
she had been held, and then bided her time
to “get back.”

Faith in friendship died in that college room.
Listening to the deeply serious voice of her critic,
each girl had some fleeting memory of that same
critic—bursting laughingly into her room for an
exchange of confidences, or protesting admiration
and liking in a sunny, hearty fashion.

A girl named Lilian Moore came in for the
worst of the drubbing. Hardly a girl present
but had discovered some glaring defect in her.

“You’ll pardon me, but your clothes have absolutely
no style, and Ambler House can’t help
wishing you were a little more modern. It hurts
a house to have to claim a girl that will not dress
properly—it destroys the tone of the whole
house.”

“Your hair—this is awful—but it really ought
to be washed more. It ought to be fluffy and
done with some care, and not—just wadded up
as you do it.”

“We like you—Doris and I were saying the
other day what a nice girl you were—but we
both said we’d like you so much better if you
didn’t say ‘indeed’ all the time.”

“You have absolutely no faculty for making
friends.”

“Your room is so unattractive—there’s nothing
in it, really, and you can’t expect girls to
want to go to see you.”

.. File: 127.png

“You don’t walk right—you stoop.”

Those were some of the things that these
dainty freshmen had been thinking about her
since the first day she had appeared among them,
shining-eyed and shy, anxious for their approval,
fearful lest she, with such limited advantages,
should fail to measure up to their wonderful
standard! And then, oh, glory of life, and happiness
undeserved, they had seemed to care after
all! They had seemed to want to talk to her,
had passed her their candy, had often come to
her to be helped with difficult algebra problems!

No one even asked her if she had any fault to
find in return. What could she have found to
criticize about *them*? So she was passed over
at last, and allowed to sink back in silence, miserably
conscious of her cotton crepe kimono that
she and her mother had made with such pride
and such appreciation of its becomingness. Her
cheeks burned a tortured red, but there was nobody
to notice her.

The hilarity with which Peggy and Katherine
had meant to accuse each other of colossal faults
had died. They sat quietly in the candle dusk,
holding each other’s hands while indignation
showed in their faces.

“And Peggy Parsons——”

It was the cold, diamond-hard voice of Myra
Whitewell speaking. “Peggy Parsons, I’ve felt
it my duty for quite a while to tell you how thoroughly
conceited you are——”

Katherine, who had shifted uneasily when the
speech began, gasped now and would have
laughed in her relief, for it seemed to her that
if there was one thing in the world everybody
must know that Peggy was *not*, it was conceited.
Myra was wide of the mark, Katherine felt, and
she did not even press her room-mate’s hand that
still lay passively in hers.

.. File: 129.png

“You feel as if you have to dip into everything,”
went on Myra, with a voice in which spite
was veiled in a grave tone of carrying out a disagreeable
duty. “You felt you must run the elections——”

“Ah,” thought Katherine, “I knew that was
the reason.”

“As if the freshman class couldn’t get along
without you! You made yourself very forward
and, it seemed to some of us, bold, by going up
and advising Alta Perry how to do things. And
Alta the junior president! It wasn’t respectful,
and it was taking a good deal on yourself!”

Here Florence Thomas, astonished that any
one should dare arraign Peggy, got up, the golden
dragons flaming in the dim light, and moved deliberately
toward the door.

She found the door locked, and the key gone.
She turned angrily.

“Until we’re through, nobody ought to go,”
explained the high-handed Myra Whitewell.
“As I was saying, Peggy, your egotism——”

“Back it up, back it up,” protested Doris Winterbean.

“Well,” Myra accepted the challenge, “that
poem of yours in the *Monthly*——”

“How did you know?” cried Peggy and Katherine,
simultaneously.

“Why, I read the foolish thing in the *Monthly*,”
snapped Myra, surprised.

Peggy, her eyes alight, and Katherine, dawning
credulity in her face, turned and met each
other’s gaze in slow triumph.

“It’s *in*?” asked Peggy breathlessly.

“Of course—how else——?” murmured Myra.

“Girls!” cried Peggy, radiantly, “my poem is
in the *Monthly*! I didn’t suppose they’d really
use it—oh, I would have told you all, if I’d been
sure. Are the new *Monthlies* down on the table
now, Myra?”

.. File: 131.png

“Yes, they’re downstairs.”

“I’m going to sneak down just as I am and get
mine,” breathed Peggy, “and then shall I read it
to you, girls?”

Faults, depression, lost faith—all forgotten in
the frank joy that was Peggy’s.

She pattered across the floor, begged prettily
for the key, took it from Hazel Pilcher’s reluctant
hand, and fitted it in the lock.

A moment later they heard her trailing down
the hall.

There was complete silence while she was
gone.

The outraged feelings were subsiding, and the
girls, who a few moments before were almost
hating each other, now waited in pleasant anticipation
the reading of the poem.

There was no warning of her return. They
were simply watching the door, which she had
left open, and all of a sudden she stood framed
in it, the soft candle glow lighting her lovely
face and blue-clad figure, and the tan cover of
the *Monthly* which she held clasped to her heart.

“I—can’t come back in,” she whispered. “I
met our house-mother on the stairs, and she made
me promise to go right to my own room if she’d
let me creep down and get the *Monthly* from the
table. It’s after ten, and all the lights are out
down the hall. Good-night, girls; I’ve had a
lovely time,” and she really believed she had.

Katherine followed her, with a backward wave
of the hand, and what more fault finding went
on after their departure they never knew.

“I s’pose it isn’t much to any one else,” said
Peggy deprecatingly, “but I just feel as if this
was the nicest number of the *Monthly* ever gotten
out!”

And Katherine answered loyally, “I do too.”

The cretonne couch covers they had smoothed
up in such haste that morning were carefully
folded back, and Katherine climbed into her bed,
and with a little tired sigh was fast asleep; but
Peggy, after carefully fixing the screen around
her room-mate’s couch so that the light shouldn’t
trouble her, propped herself up with pillows in
her own bed, the College *Monthly* on her knees.

She found her name in the index, “Margaret
Parsons,” and was thrilled by the formality of
that. Then she fluttered the leaves over—just
as any one might, she told herself, until she came,
to her intense surprise, of course, to her poem.

This she proceeded to read. And when she
had finished, she tried to read one of the stories
or a poem by some one else, but somehow nothing
seemed interesting after that—nothing had for
her quite the vividness or charm, so she shamefacedly
yielded to the temptation to read hers all
over again.

But before she had finished, a curious sound
disturbed her.

.. File: 134.png

From somewhere down the hall came the unmistakable
sobs of a person crying out her heart
in heedless abandon. It was not very loud, but
was penetrating and alarming.

Peggy listened, hardly able to believe her ears.
When she and Katherine were so happy in college,
was it possible any girl would have cause
to cry like that?—right here in Ambler House?—the
nicest dorm on Campus?

Sighing, she slid her feet into her slippers,
dipped her arms into her kimono again, laid the
precious *Monthly* on the dressing-table, turned
out the light and was soon in the fearsome hall,
with those sounds echoing down it, and no light
but the tiny globule of red at the other end, which
indicated the fire-escape.

She went on toward the unwinking light, until
she was sure she stood before the door through
which the crying emanated.

It was Lilian Moore’s room. She had a small
single room and was apparently drowning herself
in tears there.

The recklessness of the crying, the absolute
indifference as to who heard or knew, made
Peggy hesitate for just a minute before she
turned the knob of the door and went in. She
was not exactly afraid, and yet she felt very
much alone with something too painful for her
to cope with, as she felt her way into the darkness.

She felt her foot sink into a soft pile of clothing,
then immediately after, she stumbled against
some large and solid object that she never remembered
having seen in the middle of Lilian’s
room, and for which she failed utterly to account.

Lilian was throwing herself about on the bed
now, and Peggy did not know whether she realized
there was any one in the room or not. She
felt for the light, and, after much fumbling,
found it, and snapped it on.

The freshman’s room was in a state of complete
confusion. An open trunk half packed was
what she had run against in the darkness. Piles
of clothing and books were strewn round about it
on the floor, ready to go in. Lilian, herself, fully
dressed, started up from the bed with a cry, as
the glare of light flooded everything, and dropped
back moaning when she saw that it was Peggy
who had come.

“Now,” said Peggy quietly, sitting down on
the bed beside the tossing figure, “let’s be real
still or the matron will hear us.”

This obvious common sense thrown like cold
water over her misery had an immediate effect
on the other girl, who had expected sympathy.

The sobs shuddered down to long-drawn painful
breaths, and Lilian covered her swollen eyes
with two weak hands.

.. File: 137.png

“I’m sure it isn’t just the way you think,”
said Peggy, after a few minutes. “It couldn’t be
as bad as all that.”

“What couldn’t?”

“Why, whatever is the matter.”

There was a pause and then came a smothered,
“Yes, it could. It is. Oh, and I wanted to come
to college so—I wanted to come!”

“Well—and you came, and here you are with
all of us,” Peggy reminded.

“That’s just it,” the confidences came now
pouring over each other for utterance. Lilian
clasped Peggy’s cool fingers with a fevered hand.
“I wish to goodness that I hadn’t ever come. I
don’t belong. The girls showed me that to-night.
Oh, when I think of how my mother kissed me
good-bye—and—and gave me up for all this year—just
for—this——”

“For what?” helped out Peggy.

“To have the girls make fun of my room, my
clothes—and me. Listen, Miss Parsons. We
lived in a small town where nobody was very
well-to-do. And mother—wanted something
better for me than she had ever known. When
she was a girl she used to dream of going to college——”

Sobs choked the narrator and she struggled
for a moment before she could go on.

“And—when I began to grow up, she decided
that I should go—oh, Miss Parsons, when I came
away she said to remember that I was going for
both of us!”

Peggy’s fingers tightened around the feverish
hand, and she could see very clearly in her mind
the face of this girl’s mother with its wistful
yet self-sacrificing expression, and the tears came
suddenly to her eyes.

“She saved, my mother did, for years so that
there would be enough—for me—to come on
Campus like the other girls,” a trace of bitterness
crept in here. “But I didn’t know how they
dressed at a place like this and how they all fixed
up their rooms. I didn’t realize there would be
anything besides the tuition and board—and—I—didn’t—know—they
couldn’t—love me——”

Peggy tore her hand from the other’s grasp
and went and stood by the desk with her back
to the bed. Her eyes fell on a blotted and tear-stained
letter which began, “Dear Mother.”

“Listen, Lilian,” she said, going back to the
couch, “I haven’t any mother at all. That will
seem strange to you, who have seen me laughing
around here, happy and singing most of the
time. But I haven’t,—and I know that nothing
ever will quite make up. That letter you have
begun—just try to realize that no matter what
happens to me,—whatever hard thing I may have
to go through, I can’t write such a letter as that.”

Lilian stared at Peggy in surprise. Why, she
had supposed the little Miss Parsons had *everything*.

“You are the one to be envied after all,” said
Peggy. “No matter how many of the girls like
you, or how much they care, it isn’t anything to
the way a person’s own mother cares. And if
you want them to, the girls will care, too. We’ll
begin now to *make* them.”

“It’s too late—I’m going home.”

“Going home after your mother saved to send
you?—going home without the least little bit of
a try to bring things your way?—going home
and taking away your mother’s chance to enjoy
college through you?—oh, no, you’re not going
home!”

“Well,” hesitancy showed in Lilian’s manner,
“I’ve been packing my trunk. I made up my
mind that the girls would never have to see my
homely clothes any more.”

“Stay a week and—try, will you?” pleaded
Peggy. “Katherine and I would miss you awfully
if you went home now.”

“You and Katherine? Would you really?”

“Yes, really and truly. Why, when we first
knew you here, we said you were the kind of
girl we wanted for a friend, and that we were
sure we were going to like you,” fibbed kind little
Peggy, striving to find in her memory a record
that they had noticed her at all.

“Then it isn’t everybody in the house that feels
as some of those girls do?”

“Nobody really,” stoutly maintained Peggy.
“Even the ones who talked too much didn’t feel
that way. They had all just been rubbed the
wrong way by some one else—and you were an
unresisting object to fire away at in their turn.
And don’t you suppose some of the rest had just
as horrid things said to them as you did? And
they aren’t crying about it either. They are protected
by being more egotistical and sure of
themselves and they’re just thinking ‘how ignorant
that critic of mine was,’ that’s all.”

“If you want me to,” said Lilian suddenly, “I’ll
stay—for you.”

“Stay for the mother,” corrected Peggy, “and
for your own satisfaction, too.”

“Very well, I will,” came the determined voice
at last.

“Then good-night,” said Peggy, “and don’t you
think about it again to-night—will you?”

“No,” said Lilian sturdily, “I’ll think only
about to-morrow when maybe, if I come to see
you, you’ll read me your poem in the *Monthly*.”

“Why, you *dear*,” said Peggy, and, since she
was a very human little girl, she made her way
back to her room in a state of pleasant warmth
and contentment.

.. File: 143.png

CHAPTER VII—CINDERELLA
======================

As a college morning dries all tears and wipes
out all resentments of the night before, the freshmen
were only slightly haughty in their demeanor
toward each other next day, and none of the upper
classmen had reason to suspect that they had
been going through a period of stress and disillusionment
all by themselves.

Lilian came down to breakfast, ate hurriedly
and scurried off to class, after casting one quick
glance of adoration toward Peggy.

Peggy and Katherine became conspirators as
soon as she was well out of the house.

“You have time this first hour to-day, and I
have the third,” said Peggy. “So you go down
and buy some green and white cretonne and some
silk for pillow tops, and I’ll sew them up when I
come in.”

In the afternoon they hung a “Busy” sign on
their door for the first time, set the percolator
perking coffee to inspire them and plunged into
the green and white material in earnest.

“These cretonne curtains will be nearly as
pretty as ours, don’t you think so?” asked Peggy,
“and ours were made at the store. I’m getting
very proud of us as seamstresses, Kathie.”

The plain silk was made into pillow tops of red,
blue and yellow.

“The red one will brighten things so,” approved
Katherine, when she came to stitch it over a
plump pillow, one of three that the room-mates
hadn’t needed this year for themselves.

Like culprits, they sneaked down the hall, their
gay offerings wadded as closely as possible in
their arms, and knocked in fear and trembling at
Lilian’s door. If she had called “Come in,” they
would have run. But they received no answer,
so Peggy cautiously opened the door, and thrust
her curly head inside.

“It’s all right,” she whispered in relief to Katherine
a moment later, when she saw that Lilian
had not returned from class.

The friends worked quickly, and soon the
green and white curtains were hung at the windows,
and the three bright pillows were ranged
along the couch.

“But she hasn’t any couch cover at all,” wailed
Peggy, standing off to look at the result “And
the white bedspread does look so hopeless showing
through those gay cushions. What shall we
do, room-mate?”

Katherine’s forehead was wrinkled. “You
know that old green denim curtain that hangs before
the clothes closet in our bedroom, Peggy?
Don’t you suppose that would be better than nothing?
It was there when we came, but it isn’t so
very ancient looking, and it would be inconspicuous
anyway—and just about the kind of thing
you see in lots of rooms.”

With ruthless hands they tore down the big
green curtain in their own suite, snipped off the
rough end with scissors, and bore it back in
triumph to Cinderella’s apartment.

“I’m going to run over to Gloria’s,” said Peggy
then, “and ask her to part with one or two of
those pictures she got for being elected. She has
two Home-keeping Hearts that I know of, and
several pictures that look like photographs that
can’t mean much to her, and would just cheer
up our protegee wonderfully, and make her room
pass muster with any guest.”

Peggy’s tireless feet carried her blithely across
the campus to Gloria’s room, and it didn’t take
her twenty minutes to pick out what she wanted,
with Gloria’s help.

“Of course I’m glad to have your little friend
have them,” said the obliging freshman president.
“And if you want me to, I’ll come over and see
her some time and bring a lot of girls from my
house—junior celebrities and senior dramatists
and people like that, and it might have a good
effect on those Amblerites that tried to snub
her.”

“It looks like a different place,” Peggy and
Katherine congratulated themselves later when
they had done what they could in the way of
changes. “It’s changed from a poor little apology
of just a place to sleep, into an inviting and
cozy college room—with the brightest cushions
a person could imagine,” they summed up boastfully.

Lilian came dragging home from classes, tired
circles under her eyes after the strain of the
evening before, and a return of hopelessness toward
her situation. She had Peggy and Katherine
for her friends, but after all these two joyous freshmen
went very much their own way,
and were too busy with engagements with more
important people, to think of her much—the girl
with the horrid clothes and the wadded-up hair—and
the unattractive room. So she reasoned
disconsolately.

She opened her own door listlessly and entered
the room.

And then she thought that she had made a
mistake. It couldn’t be her room—of course it
wasn’t—and yet, when she turned in bewilderment
to leave it she beheld her own books on the
rickety little table.

Well, it was magic! However it had happened,
she accepted it with a queer choking sense
that she was really to live in a room like other
rooms hereafter. College had suddenly come
close.

She parted the green and white cretonne curtains
and looked out on a new world; she stroked
the bright silk cushions with a new sense of comfort
and luxury.

Then she went over to the dresser and drew
out the tear-stained letter that began “Dear
mother,” and tore it into bits. A few minutes
later her pen was flying over some clean, fresh
sheets in a glowing description of college, of her
room, of her friends.

It was the sort of letter to make a mother
think with a sigh of gladness when she read it,
“Well, she is having it all. How nice, that my
daughter can draw about her such friends. How
lovely, that she is so pleasantly situated in such
a delightful room—and how, best of all, that she
should not have been deprived of college.”

An interested group of girls clustered around
the house bulletin board on the stair landing, and
read many times the latest sign that was pinned
there:

.. File: 150.png

   | “Freshmen!!!
   | All Meet To-night
   | In Peggy Parsons’ Room.
   | Bring
   | Chafing-dishes.”

“Looks like a nice party to me,” speculated
Doris Winterbean. “But May and I haven’t a
chafing-dish. May, go and borrow one from
some sophomore, because I’m curious, and after
last night I certainly want something cheerful.”

Peggy herself knocked at Lilian’s door a few
minutes later.

“I’ve got a sign up for a party to-night,” she
said as soon as a welcoming voice had called to
her to enter, “and I thought maybe you’d like
Kay and me to fix your hair for it—it’s pretty
hair—and I thought——”

Lilian tried to say something about the benefits
she had already received at their hands, but
Peggy hurried on.

“We have a new electric hair dryer, and Kay
has some marcel irons—an amateur kind, you
know—and if you’d like to have us practise them
on you,—I think the result would surprise the
girls and send them right down to Gibot to have
theirs done.”

“I can’t let you,” stammered Lilian. “I never
*could* fix my hair well, but I wouldn’t let you
bother with it for the world.”

“Just time before dinner,” Peggy insisted,
whipping a towel from the dresser and beginning
to fasten it around the reluctant shoulders of the
other freshman.

She was led down the hall and Peggy experimented
with all the Suite 22 hair-dressing implements.
Egg shampoo, alcohol, bay rum, electric
dryer, special French orris powder, and finally
the hot curling iron.

Then Katherine dexterously did it up for her—not
in an original style at all, but in the mode
that had swept the entire college: so that when
their work was finished and the victim was
handed an oval ivory mirror, she exclaimed with
wonder, for there was reflected a nice-looking-girl
just like a hundred others in Hampton, with
wonderful ripples of soft gleaming hair, that
made you want to follow the waves with your
fingers.

“Is that me?” asked Lilian.

“We’ll forgive you for being ungrammatical,
since it’s all in recognition of our efforts,” said
Peggy delightedly. “It is very much you—the
way you ought to have been all along, and will,
I hope, continue to be, now that we’ve shown you
the way. Mercy, Kay, she does look wonderful!
If you and I ever get poor, we’ll know of one
talent we have at least whereby we can hope to
make an honest living.”

So Lilian came that night to the party, very
much elated, and entirely self-confident, instead
of shrinking and conscious of making an inferior
appearance.

Those who had chafing-dishes had brought
them, those who had not had borrowed them.
Beside each chafing-dish, the hostesses had arranged
a little set of materials.

“Now, two chafing-dishes are prepared to
make fudge, one sea-foam, and one chocolate
marshmallow. Will the freshmen kindly pair off
and choose what they want to make? Here are
the materials for white taffy over here, as a prize
for the ones that get done first.” Peggy made the
announcement, and the girls lit the chafing-dishes
and started in with great zeal.

This was the kind of party to please them all.
Nothing but candy—and all they could make and
eat of that!

“This is an anti-climax party,” explained
Katherine, when the fudge was bubbling with its
rich delicious odor, in the chafing-dish chosen by
Florence Thomas and herself. “Peg and I
thought of the awful faults we all found in each
other last night”—*they* hadn’t done any of the
finding, but the others didn’t notice that they
painted themselves blacker than they were—“and
we have a suggestion to make as to how to cure
them.”

The girls were a little displeased—more of
that criticism business? they wondered. Even
the tempting odor of the cooking candy couldn’t
quite appease them.

“It’s just a way to wipe out the faults as soon
as possible,” said Peggy with her funny and irresistible
little smile. “I thought if we each
cured the faults of the others in our own minds,
why—where would they be?”

There was an alarming simplicity to this.

Doris dropped her fudge spoon.

“What do you mean, Peggy?” she demanded.

“Well,” laughed Peggy gleefully, delighted
with the discovery she and Katherine had made,
“that party last night did no good, some way.
Everybody went home feeling disgruntled and
out of sorts—and overwhelmed more or less with
their own imperfections. If each fault-finder
just—doesn’t find fault, you know,—even in her
own mind, there won’t be any fault pretty soon
to be found.”

“Don’t see it,” said Myra Whitewell.

“If *you*,” Peggy turned to her patiently, “if
*you* just wiped out the notion you had about me—and
stopped letting it torment you—that I
wanted to run things, you know,—why, why—then
you wouldn’t see me like that, would you?
Pretty soon every one in Ambler House would be
praising every one else, and loving every one so
much that the other houses would begin to notice,
and would catch the infection. I think it’s better
to let our enemies find fault with us, if they must,
but not our friends.”

.. File: 156.png

“Ambler House would get a wonderful reputation
for having the best freshmen on Campus
if we all boosted our house and our classmates
everywhere, I can see that,” ventured Florence
Thomas eagerly.

“Well, shall we try?” urged Peggy, “shall we
just try it out as an experiment?”

Because it was Peggy, and because the idea
was new, and because the candy was just ready
to eat now, and very tempting, the good-natured
freshmen light-heartedly promised to try her plan—and
to follow it faithfully until it had had time
to show either some result—or no result at all.

This was the beginning of an attitude of mind
that later became habitual with that group of
freshmen. It wasn’t many weeks after this anti-fault-finding
party in Peggy’s room that, if a
first-year girl heard that another lived in Ambler
House, she was filled with wistful envy; for the
good times the Amblerites had, their gay and
loyal friendship became matters of common college
discussion.

Myra Whitewell would not have worked into
the system if she could have helped it. But the
others, very much in earnest under the stimulus
of Peggy’s sunny example, refused to give heed
to her grouches, or to be hurt at her snubs,—and
they never failed to speak well of her outside,
so that this praise of theirs came to her
ears at last, and filled her heart with warmth in
spite of herself, and she could not do less than
give them her friendship—yes, and even her
warped and selfish love,—in the end.

There was candy enough left after the spread
that night for each freshman to take a plateful to
her particular junior or senior friend.

As they were leaving, their faces glowing with
appreciation of the pleasant evening they had
just spent, and in anticipation of the junior’s or
senior’s delight at their offering, Doris Winterbean
drew Peggy aside and whispered in her
ear:

“Well, I don’t know, Pegkins, it’s rather wonderful,
but I’ve tried your plan ever since you
spoke of it and it’s had an uncanny effect. Why,
do you know, I already see the greatest difference
in that Lilian girl? Honestly! Peggy, her hair
looks *pretty* to me now, and I thought it was
horrid last night. And her face and manner—she
just seemed as happy and confident as anybody,
instead of so shy and uncomfortable. It’s—magic,
Peggy, and you may not believe me,
but I really do see her altogether differently.”

And Peggy burst out into a little laugh of enjoyment,
and her eyes followed Lilian with pride.
But she did not think it was necessary to disabuse
the mind of Lilian’s new admirer by telling
her that the “magic” had a very material
foundation.

.. File: 159.png

CHAPTER VIII—INDIAN SUMMER
==========================

Glory lay over the whole college world.

The sun blazed upon an earth more beautiful
than Peggy and Katherine ever remembered to
have seen it. The woods, when the two took their
walks, were as red with burnished leaves as if
they had been on fire.

And a golden haze came in the morning and at
sunset.

The mystery, the still power, and the vague
melancholy of autumn, crept through the veins of
the Hampton girls, and they walked and picnicked
on Leeds rocks, and sang away the glorious
afternoons far into the twilight, when the
sudden coolness warned them of what they would
forget—that these days were going, and that
winter would soon be upon them.

Peggy and Katherine saw their first autumn
at college dissolving in that golden haze almost
before they had begun to enjoy it and to realize
that all this was really theirs—this life among
seventeen hundred girls, all young, all having
identical interests, all happy and congenial.

There came a Saturday afternoon too lovely
to be spent at home.

“What shall we do to-day, Katherine?” Peggy
asked. “Let’s just go somewhere by ourselves.
Do you want to drive, or walk, or have a bacon
bat or take some books down by Paradise and
read?”

A day like that one suggests many ways for
enjoyment, but if there is one thing more absolutely
satisfying than another, and just-the-thing-to-do
on such a Saturday afternoon, it is to tramp
over to the cider mill, with a jug and a capacity-appetite
for new cider and ginger cookies.

So it was inevitable that Peggy and Katherine
should decide on this as the ideal adventure, after
they had exhausted all the possibilities.

“That cider mill seems just as much a part of
the college as Seelye Hall,” laughed Katherine.
“Peggy, can’t you taste that wonderful cider
now? Let’s go right away,—I think we can
walk over and back, don’t you?”

That would mean about a nine-mile jaunt.

Somebody in the house had a gallon jug, and
the room-mates promptly and unceremoniously
“borrowed” this and, with silk sweater coats,
and a ribbon tied around their heads to keep
their hair from blowing, started off into the
wonder of Indian summer, their hearts full of
joy over every one of the nine miles that lay before
them.

The road was dusty, the jug was heavy, the
day was hot. After two miles they were warm
and thirsty—and hungry, too, and their feet
dragged a little.

“Oh, that cider, that cider,” laughed Katherine.
“I wish it could come part way to meet us!”

“Never mind, room-mate,” cheered Peggy,
with mock heroism; “only a mile and a half to
go now, and then the lovely cider will be running
into our jug, and we can get several glassesful
to drink there. And ginger cookies to your
heart’s content, Kay.”

“Can’t we—speed up a little?” urged Katherine
on the strength of that; “if we just double our
steps, we’ll get there sooner.”

So the dust clouded up more thickly under
their hastening footsteps, and the mile and a half
dwindled and disappeared, until there before
them was the cider mill itself, keeping guard
over a little stream that gurgled into the mill and
out again.

.. File: 163.png

“At last, room-mate!” hailed Katherine.

“Katherine,” hesitated Peggy, right in sight of
their goal, “have you—have you thought how
much heavier the jug will be to carry back when
it is full?”

Katherine cast at her one withering glance,
seized her arm, and the two ran now, the jug
bumping as it would against their knees, and the
perspiration bright on their foreheads.

“It looks like a deserted castle,” panted Peggy
when they turned up the worn pathway to the
entrance of the mill. “And isn’t it quiet?
Doesn’t it usually make some kind of noise?”

“You’re thinking of the planing mill, infant,”
mocked Katherine.

“Well,—I—anyway, Katherine, the door is
shut.”

“It won’t be hard to open,—why can’t
you—?”

“Yes, I can open it,” Peggy answered, stepping into
the entrance hall where the glasses of
cider and the little packs of ginger cookies were
usually sold, “but there’s no one here now that
we’re in, and it looks more deserted than ever
and there isn’t even a *crumb* of a ginger cooky—and
I’m starved, nor a *sip* of cider—and I’m
*thirsty*!”

“Why, this is Saturday, too. What do you suppose
is wrong, Peggy? I’m absolutely dead, if
I must confess it. I can’t possibly walk home
without a cool drink of cider to brace me up. I
never was so hungry and tired in my life.”

“That’s his house, I think,” Peggy nodded
across the road toward a comfortable-looking
farm house.

“Do you suppose the cider man would be
home?”

“Anyway,” Peggy said faintly, “his wife
would, and she might have some ginger cookies.”

They hurried down the walk and shuffled
across the dusty road, feeling that if they were
disappointed now they could scarcely bear it.

They went to the side door of the farm house
and knocked timidly.

“Oh, Peggy, they’re *eating*!” gasped Katherine.
“I feel like a tramp. I almost wish I was
one, too, and then maybe they’d invite us in. But
isn’t it a late time to be having dinner?”

The cider man’s wife stood in the doorway
now, smiling at them somewhat impatiently.

“Did you come for cider?” she asked. “Well,
about ten others have been here before you to-day,
on the same errand, but he didn’t make any
to-day. And there aren’t any ginger cookies.
We didn’t have anything for the other girls,
either. I never saw anybody like you college
girls—a person feels guilty if he rests one day,—what
with you all being hungry and thirsty just
the same. I’m real sorry.”

.. File: 166.png

“We—we brought a jug,” said Peggy pathetically.

“Brought a jug? Ernie!” (raising her voice,
and calling back into the room where the table
was). “They brought a jug.”

Ernie called back something, and a smile flitted
across his wife’s face.

“He says if you want to wait till he’s through
dinner, he’ll go over and make some,” she interpreted.
“We’re very late getting dinner to-day—we’ve
had so many interruptions. But if you
want to wait———?”

“We’ll wait!” cried Peggy and Katherine in
the same breath.

“It will be about an hour,” said the woman,
closing the door.

“An hour!” Peggy and Katherine exchanged
glances with deep sighs, and trudged down the
steps, and slowly back toward the mill.

The cider mill was an important institution
to Hampton girls—and to Amherst boys, if they
cared to walk so far. The man who owned it
seemed to feel an especial responsibility toward
college girls—as every one does near a college
town—and so he kept a counter in the entrance
hall over which he sold as much cider as a girl
wanted to drink, for five cents. One of his stalwart
young helpers would fill her glass as many
times as she wished, for the single first payment.

Then there were the ginger cookies, done up in
oiled paper, in packages of a dozen, that his wife
had made, and these the hungry young invaders
could purchase at ten cents a package. They
seemed so much a part of it all that cider never
tastes quite perfect to Hampton graduates, to this
day, without ginger cookies. Any of the Hampton
girls would have been surprised to visit any
other cider mill and find that their order for ginger
cookies was not understood.

Opposite the mill, on the same side as the farmer’s
house, but farther back, and screened all
around by a circlet of trees, so that it sparkled
in the midst of them like a Corot painting, was
the cool mill-pond, with reeds and rushes growing
out into it, and shady branches overhanging
it.

Drawn toward this now in their search for
something of interest to while away the time,
Peggy and Katherine parted the bushes and
young birch trees, and found themselves looking
into the very heart of beautiful things, with all
the world of dust and disappointment and fatigue
behind them.

“That water looks cool,” murmured Peggy
gladly.

“Yes; I don’t know as it’s safe drinking water,
but I think we might *wade* in it.”

“If we have time.”

“An hour?—why of course there’s time. What
else can we do to amuse ourselves?”

.. File: 169.png

They were as entirely hidden from the road
and the farm house as if they had been in another
world. Without more argument, the two
sat down and Katherine slipped out of her grey
pumps, and flung her grey silk stockings after
them. Peggy was wearing tan oxfords and tan
stockings.

“O-oh, who would dream there could be anything
so cold on such a warm day?” gasped
Peggy, trying it with her toes.

“I like this reedy, weedy part,” laughed Katherine,
her feet dipping in up to her ankles.

They sat, thus, side by side, dangling their feet
like happy children, seeking to fathom with their
eyes how soon the water got deep enough to
drown them, should they step out farther, and
watching idly the patterns made by the sea-weed
strands near the shore.

“What if a fish should come?” cried Katherine
suddenly, and laughed at the expedition with
which Peggy’s feet came glistening up out of the
water. “Don’t be silly, Peggy,” she giggled, “fish
can’t bite anything but flies and worms.”

“Maybe the kind that would live in a mill-pond
could,” said Peggy, comfortably sliding the reassured
feet back into the still water. “And anyway,
who wants to dispute habitation with a
fish?”

With all manner of the gayest and most idiotic
prattle they whiled away that endless hour, and
if any one had stood just outside the fringe of
little trees and had heard their voices without
seeing them, he would never in the world have
guessed that such inconsequential conversation
was being indulged in by two freshmen in good
standing of the largest woman’s college in
America; girls who would be candidates for the
degree within four years and who were even now
in the process of being moulded into “intelligent
gentlewomen.”

.. File: 171.png

“Hasn’t that bird a funny whistle?” asked
Katherine suddenly. “Listen! He whistles just
like a person!”

And as soon as the words were out of her
mouth, she was covered with confusion, for the
realization came to her that it was a person,—somebody
going by on the road, probably, and
they had so far forgotten the world outside their
own green hedge that it had startled them.

“I’m going to peek out,” said Peggy. Thrusting
the leaves aside, she made a tiny opening,—large
enough for her eyes to get a clear view of
the road.

And then all of a sudden she sprang up, her
face hot with excitement, and made as if to burst
through the thicket to the road itself. She would
have accomplished this had not Katherine caught
her dress and dragged her back so violently that
she sat down, breathless, on the bank of the pond,
exclaiming over and over in gladness, “It’s Jim!
Katherine, it’s Jim!”

“Your shoes and stockings, child,” urged Katherine.
“Put them on, quick.”

But Peggy seized one grey and one tan stocking
and on they went over her wet feet. Then
she stepped into her tan oxfords and flew out
from shelter.

Katherine looked helplessly after the retreating
Peggy, and then down at the assorted pair of
stockings left for her. “There seems to be nothing
to do but put them on,” she sighed resignedly.
In a few minutes she emerged from the
shadows with as much dignity as she could assume.

And there down the road was Peggy, the full
blaze of the autumn sun on her golden head, her
eager face uplifted and aglow, and towering
above her two good-looking young men, apparently
oblivious to everything except this strange
and vivacious little apparition that had burst so
suddenly upon them.

One, Katherine recognized at once as Jim
Huntington Smith, the grandson of old Mr.
Huntington, whom they had known last year at
Andrews, and through whose generosity Peggy
had been enabled to come to college.

The two girls had been the means of discovering
Jim’s relationship to the owner of “Gloomy
House,” as the old Huntington place was known,
and of re-uniting these two members of the same
family.

So they regarded Jim as very much their property;
as they might look upon some handsome
older cousin.

Peggy was waving an arm back towards the
pond, and the boys were laughing. Then as she
went on with her gesticulations they looked up
and saw Katherine.

Katherine had been shrinking back against the
trees that lined the water, very conscious of the
one tan stocking and the other grey one. She
was trying to make up her mind whether to go
forward and divert Peggy some way so that she
would let these boys go, and would come back
and change stockings, or whether she should go
back and hide, and run the risk of having the
whole joyous trio down the road charge upon her
unexpectedly.

It was all settled for her now.

Jim swung his cap in the air and started toward
her, while Peggy and the other young man
followed more slowly. And even at such a time
Katherine couldn’t help noticing the funny little
way Peggy’s eye-lashes kept sweeping down
and up again, and how pretty and pink her face
was.

“Oh,” smiled Katherine to herself, “if she
should suddenly wake up and notice her own
feet.”

.. File: 175.png

“Well, Katherine Foster, how are you?” Jim
was saying, wringing her hand heartily. “This
is certainly fine. Bud and I walked over from
Amherst to get some cider, but found there was
none to be had. But meeting you people compensates
for it all.”

“Oh, but there’s going to be some cider, too,”
Katherine informed him; “that’s what we’re
waiting for. The man is just finishing his dinner
and he promised to come over and make some for
us. I hope he’ll let us watch him—I never saw
any cider made.”

“We’ll stick around.”

“Do—and maybe———”

“Well?”

“Maybe you’ll help us carry our jug home.
It’s just inside the trees there.”

“I should say we will. It turns out to be mutually
lucky that we met; we have the advantage
of cider being made and you get your jug carried home.
How’s Hampton anyway? Like it
as well as you thought you would? Peggy has
sent me a post-card now and then, but they all
say the regulation thing: ‘Having a glorious time,
the cross is our room,’ ‘Perfectly lovely up here,
nice weather for ducks,’—you know the kind.”

Katherine laughed. She remembered the day
she and Peggy had picked out a complete set of
post-cards with Hampton views, and how they
had been in the habit of dispatching them with
the most bromidic messages they could think of,
to their friend at Amherst.

“We just did it for fun,” she told him now.
“We wanted to embarrass you before the other
fellows by having a perfect flood of the usual type
of post-cards coming in from a girls’ college.
We thought you’d know. Why, we even signed
them all sorts of different things—‘Essie,’ and
‘Jennie’ and ‘Millicent’ and——”

“And Marmalade,” added Jim with a twinkle
in his eye. “I have them all, making a border
around my room. The other boys are green with
envy. They——”

At this moment Peggy and her companion
reached them, and Peggy interrupted Jim in perfect
unconcern.

“Katherine, I want you to meet Mr. Bevington,
of Amherst college; Mr. Bevington, this is
Miss Foster, my room-mate.”

“Awfully pleased to meet you,” murmured the
Bevington youth over Katherine’s hand.

“You may not be when you know what your
friend, Jim, has volunteered for you,” laughed
Katherine.

“It couldn’t make any difference.”

“He’s promised that you and he will carry our
cider jug home for us when we get it filled.”

“Has he?” cried Peggy delightedly. “Oh,
that’s going to be lovely. It was awfully heavy,
Mr. Bevington, when we were dragging it over
here. At first it seemed as light as a feather, but
before we had traveled a mile it became as heavy
and awkward as a cannon ball.”

“So you see,” Katherine turned and laughed
up at Bud Bevington, “there’s an awful task
ahead of you.”

But of course both young men were delighted
to carry any burden for two such charming young
ladies, and as they started back toward the mill
the talk veered to other subjects and ranged from
sports to house dances, when the owner of the
mill came up to them.

“Are you the college girls that wanted the
cider?” he asked jovially.

“Two of us are,” Peggy answered primly.
“But all of us would like to come and watch you
make it if we may.”

“You can help,” answered the man.

So with that delightful prospect ahead of them,
they entered the rambling building, dim except
where the sunlight found a crack between the
dusty boards and streamed weakly in.

They followed the man up a winding stairway,
that was like climbing to some quaint old attic.
There was one place where they could look down
and see the black, gold-specked water rushing
away under the stairs. It gave Peggy a creepy
feeling. The specks of gold were dots of light
that fell into its darkness.

“It—makes an awful roaring noise—kind of
subterranean sound,” murmured Katherine, but
nobody heard her, because of the rush of the
stream.

When they reached the loft above, they stood
to one side waiting for the man to begin.

“The young ladies are going to make the
cider,” he said.

“Oh,” cried Peggy, “that’s fine, but how do we
begin?”

The man hauled over several large sacks of apples,
lifted a round cover in the floor, bringing
to view a kind of chute.

“Pour them apples down there,” he invited.

With the assistance of the boys, they lifted
the sacks and the apples went tumbling down
through the opening. But Peggy and Katherine
were aghast to see what kind of apples they were.

“Why, some of those I poured down were just—*awfully*
bad,” declared Peggy. “In fact, quite
decomposed,” she added facetiously.

“Don’t they get sorted out down below?”
Katherine inquired anxiously when the last of
the sacks had been emptied.

But the cider man only laughed.

When they went down, the apples fell into a
kind of wagon without wheels, which moved
slowly by machinery, till it reached a certain
place, where heavy weights came down from
above and slowly crushed the fruit. Very soon a
small stream of clear amber juice ran down a
trough and into a large hogshead.

The cider man filled their jug, and then gave
them each a glass, and told them to drink all they
wanted from the hogshead, without additional
charge, since he had made the cider just for
them.

Sweet, clear and refreshing as any cider in the
world, this came to their thirsty lips. And yet—the
girls thought they had never enjoyed cider
less. The memory of that collection of apples
that had gone hurtling down the chute!

The boys, however, were enthusiastic, because
Peggy and Katherine had made it, and they
praised it highly enough so that the kindly owner
of the mill did not notice the heroic efforts of his
two feminine guests to seem appreciative.

Out into the sunlight again the little party
came, Jim carrying the jug nonchalantly on his
shoulder.

.. File: 182.png

“Rebecca at the well,” he laughed; “here she
is in moving pictures.”

And the others laughed, too, and began the
long walk toward Hampton, as refreshed as if
they were just starting out for the day.

The farmer stood in the doorway of his mill,
and watched the departure with a friendly smile.

There is nothing so wonderfully satisfying as
college Saturday afternoon, with all lessons forgotten—and
only a restful Sunday in the immediate
future. And such a perfect fall day as
this!

The friends strolled leisurely along, enjoying
the brilliant coloring of the trees, and the
beautiful golden sunlight of a late October afternoon.

They had nearly reached Hampton village and
Katherine was beginning to think that Peggy
would reach Ambler House without discovering
her mistake about the stockings when, with a
thrill of horror, she heard her say, “Look at my
feet, how *dusty* they are—you couldn’t tell *what*
color shoes I had on.”

“But, oh, dear, if they aren’t blind they can tell
what color *stockings*,” moaned Katherine to herself.

Politely Jim and their new friend glanced
down at the dusty oxfords.

Jim gave a start and was about to speak, when
Katherine saw him suddenly look at her feet, too.
His eyes twinkled.

“Is that a—new fad?” he asked finally. “A
fellow would never dare adopt anything so
radical.”

“Is what a new fad?” demanded the unconscious
Peggy, and then she looked down and
saw.

Her face burned with a quick red, but she
laughed infectiously. “We—we went wading,
and I suppose I did this when I saw you, Jim, so
it’s all his fault. Kay dear, can you forgive?”

Jim and Bud laughed with her, and of course
the devoted Katherine forgave on the spot.

Young men are not allowed to linger in the
grounds at Hampton, so the adieus were quickly
said and Peggy and Katherine hurried across the
campus to Ambler House.

No sooner had they reached their room than
word went down the hall that there was cider in
room 22, and one by one the girls on the second
floor found excuses to drop into Peggy’s and
Katherine’s room. They were most generously
supplied with cider, as they hoped they would
be, and Peggy and Katherine had no wish to
keep any of it for themselves, after they had
seen the sort of apples that went into it.

“Funny thing,” said Peggy sadly as they were
dressing for the evening later, “I don’t believe
I’ll ever like cider so very much again.”

.. File: 185.png

“No,” agreed Katherine, “the safest way to
do, if you want to keep your enthusiasm for anything,
is not to know how it’s made.”

“You’re right. I’ll shut my eyes more after
this,” laughed Peggy, “but anyway, dear room-mate,
we had an awfully nice time, didn’t we?”

“Oh, so, so,” answered Katherine noncommittally.

.. File: 186.png

CHAPTER IX—THE HOUSE DANCE
==========================

It seemed no time at all to Peggy, after the
Indian summer passed, that winter rushed upon
them and shriveled them up on their way to
classes, and blew powdered snow in their faces
when they went for their walks.

“There’s only one thing I can think of to
brighten things up,” wailed Doris Winterbean
one day, “so that we’ll all carry away pleasant
memories of the place for Christmas.”

“Well, what’s that?” asked Peggy, without interest,
for each day of hers was as full of good
times as it could be, and she thought she wouldn’t
need pleasant things to remember over the holidays
anyway, because she would be enjoying
herself so much during them that it would crowd
all thoughts of past and future, too, out of her
head.

“A house dance,” said Doris thrillingly.

Peggy was all interest now.

“Would they—could we get one up before
Christmas?” she asked. “But then,” the brightness
faded from her eyes, “I have to lead half
of the time and I’m not tall enough, so it really
doesn’t matter as much to me as it might.”

“Oh, pshaw,” exclaimed Doris, “I didn’t mean
that kind of a dance. Not just girls, you know.”

“No-o?” said Peggy cautiously.

“Of course not.”

“Well, whom then?”

“Oh, people from Amherst or Williams—or
Dartmouth or wherever we can get them.”

“You mean a *man* dance?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s have it right away.”

.. File: 188.png

“I don’t know anybody to ask, except a young
prep school boy, but——”

“Oh, I’ll have Jim bring over a lot of people
from Amherst, and we can decorate the room
with purple in their honor, and then we can all
sing their songs when the dancing is over.”

The plans for the dance were soon being elaborately
laid by every Amblerite. The matron said
it must be in the afternoon. So they set a convenient
Saturday, and dispatched their invitations
informally over the telephone. Jim responded
so nobly to the appeal Peggy made to
him, that he rounded up half a dozen football
stars and glee club men for the partners of the
girls who didn’t know anybody within telephoning
distance.

“I’ll bring the whole frat, if you say so,” came
Jim’s cheerful voice over the wire. “Half of them
can’t dance to amount to anything, but they can
stand around and be ornamental—and fetch and
carry ices.”

“Well, our dancing isn’t a thing of beauty
and a joy forever either, but that won’t keep us
off the floor. Bring anybody you like, that is,
of the kind I mentioned, but they must be willing.”

“*Willing*? Can you take care of all Amherst
if I bring it?”

“*Yes*,” responded Peggy enthusiastically. “*We*
could, but there wouldn’t be ices enough.”

“Oh, well,” laughed Jim, “you can’t expect us
to come without ices.”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, you expect us Saturday. Six of us
anyway. I’ll bring the crowd over in my machine.”

“Oh, *Jim*! Have you a machine?”

“Better believe I have. And some day, when
the weather is fine, I’ll take you riding.”

.. File: 190.png

“Oh, goody! What kind is it?”

“A Ford.”

And Peggy hung up the receiver on the laugh
that drifted to her over the wire.

She climbed to her room and sank silently
down on the window seat.

All the recitations of Saturday morning
dragged unaccountably whenever an Ambler
House girl was called on.

They were too eager for classes to be over
and the time for the dance to come, to take a
great interest in dative and accusative cases, or
in the sum of the angles of right angle triangles.

“I’m going to dress as carefully as I *can*,” said
Peggy, scrubbing her happy face until it shone.

“Yes, do, dear, and please take time to put on
stockings that are mates,” laughed Katherine as
she laid a dainty afternoon dress upon the bed
and removed her pumps from their shoe-trees.

After many little pats on ruffles and curls
Peggy and Katherine were dressed at last, and
stood before their mirrors almost satisfied.

Then Katherine went downstairs to see if the
girls needed any last help with the decorations.

Hazel Pilcher stuck her head in at Peggy’s
door.

“Ready?” she called.

Peggy swung from the mirror and bowed to
her, laughing.

“As ready as I can be,” she said. “Hazel, you
look simply wonderful. You look—like somebody
in the movies or on the stage.”

“Well,” said Hazel easily. “*You* might look
prettier than you do, Peggy; you don’t make the
most of yourself.”

Peggy turned her disappointed gaze back to
the mirror.

“Come down to my room and I’ll just fix you
up a little,” said Hazel.

Now Hazel’s ideas of dress, and those of the
rest of the girls in the house, widely differed.
For she always bought the most extreme styles
in hats and suits, and she always adopted the
most exaggerated new mannerisms of walking
and talking.

So Peggy was inclined to be doubtful of the
value of her assistance, but Hazel urged her, so
she finally went down to her room.

Here, Hazel uncorked several delightful-looking
little jars.

“You’d better shut your eyes,” warned she,
and a minute later something cool was sliding
along Peggy’s eye-lashes, and then she felt it
again, going over her eye-brows.

She knew in a horrible moment just what was
happening, but the foolish wish to look as wonderful
as possible, held her silent, and prevented
the protest that had sprung to her lips.

“And now,” said Hazel, in a matter-of-fact
way, “your lips.”

.. File: 193.png

And Peggy watched fascinatedly in a hand-glass
while the dainty, scented little red pencil
made its crimson imprint on her mouth.

“And—just a touch on your cheeks,” said Hazel
again.

“No,” said Peggy, “that would be too absurd;
I won’t——”

“Well,” conceded Hazel, laughing, “you don’t
really need it; your face is as red as fire now.
You seem to think your looks are very much
changed. But they’re just improved. Everybody
will still *recognize* you, you know, Peggy,
infant.”

“They’re here; they’re here,” an excited buzz
went through the second floor, at the word of
some generous messenger, who had run up for
a minute from below, to spread the news.

Peggy forgot everything in the haste she made
to get down to greet the boys, for she was responsible
for the coming of a large number of
the guests, and she thought how peculiar Jim
would think it if she were not even there to welcome
them.

“Jim,” she cried, holding out her hand. “I’m
awfully glad to see you. And Mr. Bevington,
too. No, you’re not a bit early. We’ve been
upstairs twiddling our thumbs and wondering
why in the world—we thought the Ford must
have broken down, you know,” she added as she
opened the door into the big reception room,
which looked very lovely with its many purple
banners.

With the handsome Amherst contingent at
her heels, Peggy carried her small curly head
high while a pardonable pride shone in her eyes.

A gasp went up from the groups of girls, who
were standing about in different parts of the big
room, talking to the few guests who had arrived
before the Amherst men.

“Look what Peggy Parsons has with her,”
murmured Doris Winterbean to Florence
Thomas, while the small princess advanced, chatting
with her subjects.

Never had such a fine set of young men descended
upon Ambler—or any other campus
house, for any occasion except the incomparable
annual occasion of Junior prom.

“Doris, let me present Mr. Bevington, who
plays on the football team; and Mr. Mason, the
president of the dramatic club, and Mr. Brown,
the one who wrote that article we were all so
crazy about in their paper.”

Thus the introductions went on, and the girls
who met these heroes would have been tongue-tied
before such greatness had not Peggy, before
she left them, raised them also to eminence. Miss
Winterbean was the one who had invented the
Lilian Walker waltz the girls would teach their
guests that afternoon; Miss Thomas, of course,
was the vice-president of the freshman class—“the
best class——” Peggy leaned over and whispered
it, so that the girls who were not members
of it shouldn’t hear,——“the best class that had
ever come to Hampton.” Miss Pilcher was the
house entertainer, and could play anything that
was written, for a piano.

Hearing themselves thus praised, the girls took
heart and laughed happily up into the faces of
the men as the music began.

“My Little Dream Girl” caught them up into
its delightful, sweet rhythm, and with such partners
as they had not enjoyed before in college,
the Hampton girls were swung out across the
floor.

To Peggy, laughing up at Bud Bevington, it
seemed that the whole world was dancing. He
knew so many funny steps, and threaded his way
so dangerously among the other couples, doubling
the time, and then going even faster, until their
one-step was simply a run-step as fast as they
could go.

“You—you think—this is a football field,”
gasped Peggy, when she could speak at all. “I—I’m
half dead—I know now how it feels to be
a football.”

“You mean I’ve been kicking you,—did I hit
your foot, really?”

Bud was contrition itself.

“N-no, certainly you didn’t; how could you
when they went so fast? I mean you have been
making a goal with me.”

“I hope the goal is a long way off,” laughed the
football man.

They had gone around nearly twice more, when
he bent and said suddenly in Peggy’s ear, “Who
is our cross-looking friend in the doorway with
the Charley Chaplin scowl?”

“Man or woman?” asked Peggy.

“Woman,” he answered.

.. File: 198.png

“Well, I see quite a group of our house-matron
in the doorway—but she is probably only one, but
if you don’t stop running with me so fast I can’t
be really sure whether there are ten of her or
just one.”

Noticeably slackening his pace, he glanced
again toward the matron.

“Still looks ominous,” he warned.

“You must come over and meet her—but let’s
go very slowly for a while, till the atmosphere
clears a little.”

When they finally approached the matron, she
smiled at Bud Bevington—who could help it?
And Peggy was able to get her breath, while the
two talked for a few minutes.

Peggy danced every dance, sometimes in the
large reception room with all the others, and
sometimes in the alcove parlor off at one end,
where new steps could be tried without any onlookers,
if failure resulted.

.. File: 199.png

She noticed that several of her partners looked
at her rather intently, and she fervently hoped
it was because she looked very nice. But there
was usually a fleeting smile that baffled her. No,
it was something besides admiration—or a new
kind of admiration or something—oh, she would
give up trying to account for it, and just have
a good time.

So she danced with every guest and enjoyed
her ices, and said good-bye to the boys with great
reluctance, and pressed her nose against the window
pane to see the last of them.

Jim, glancing back, as he started the machine—which
wasn’t a Ford at all—saw her and
waved.

The machine chugged off, and she went upstairs
with a happy sigh and a little regretful that
their house dance was over.

When she reached her room, Katherine, who
had preceded her, gave her one startled glance,
and then burst out laughing.

“Oh, you look awful, child,” she said, “whatever
happened to you?”

And Peggy rushed to the mirror.

Horror of horrors—what—and then she remembered!
Those eye-lashes and eye-brows that
Hazel had put on so carefully—and those lips,
too—had run! The black wavered down greasily
from her eyes, making weird dark lines. The
mouth with which she had so carelessly eaten ices
was—a good deal to one side now.

“I forgot,” murmured Peggy, and that was all
she was able to say, and this she repeated miserably
at intervals, while Katherine dipped a towel
in the water pitcher and began applying it to
the beautifiers.

“Don’t tell me until you want to,” said Katherine,
trying to keep the giggles back, and to
speak sympathetically. “It isn’t so very bad—just
kind of—wavy.”

“Well,” moaned Peggy, “Hazel Pilcher put it
on. I can’t think how I came to let her, and—it
must have been awfully poor make-up and got
so—warm——!”

Her explanation ended in a sob and she jerked
away from Katherine’s ministrations, and flung
herself a crying heap upon the couch.

“Oh, Katherine! and I thought I looked so
nice! Oh, they all saw and *knew*, and the ones
I just met to-day couldn’t know but I marked up
my face like that always. It’s—it’s awful—I
wish I had never come to college—I wish I’d
never seen an Amherst man—or Hazel Pilcher
either. What shall I do?”

“Jim knows,” Katherine soothed.

“B-but he’ll be ashamed of me,” moaned
Peggy.

.. File: 202.png

“He won’t either. He’ll just think it’s funny,”
Katherine tried to comfort her.

“Funny! Oh, dear, and I suppose it is—but
not to me. And Bud Bevington—every time he’s
seen me there’s been something—r-ridiculous
about me!”

Peggy shook with sobs, and hid her face in the
cushions of the window seat, sure that she would
never take any pleasure in life again.

She wouldn’t go down to dinner, so Katherine
had it sent up on a tray, and though Peggy felt
that she really wasn’t the tiniest bit hungry, she
ate all that was brought to her, and almost wished
she had decided to go down after all, because
then she might have asked for a second helping.

Katherine and the other freshmen made up
an impromptu party to go to a picture show that
evening, but Peggy could not be persuaded to
join them.

“I never knew her to sulk before,” said Florence
Thomas. “What in the world is the matter
with her?”

“Sulk,” cried Katherine indignantly, “why
Peggy doesn’t know how to *sulk*. She—she just
had a very sad thing happen to her, and you’d
cry, too, if it happened to you, only you wouldn’t
get over it as soon as Peggy will.”

The picture show wasn’t a great deal of fun
for Katherine when most of her thoughts were
drifting back to her poor room-mate. The rest
of the girls laughed and cried at little Mary Pickford’s
pathos and drollery, but she felt it difficult
to keep her attention on the screen, and was
almost glad when it was over, and they could
hurry back to Ambler House.

The door of Suite 22 stood open, all the lights
blazed forth, the sound of happy laughter came
to her ears and the unmistakable perfume of
American beauty roses greeted her nostrils.

“Peggy!” she cried, as she entered the room,
to find every available vase full of the most
gorgeous roses she had ever seen, and an appreciative
sophomore and junior court listening to
the tale of Peggy’s sad experiences of the afternoon.

“You little wretch,” she said, shaking her fist
at her room-mate in mock rage, “when you get
*me* to sympathize with you again, you’ll know it.
It’s just a joke now, isn’t it, but, girls, she was
crying her eyes out over it an hour or so ago.”

“Th-that’s just what I’ve been telling them,”
cried Peggy, “and now I can’t think how I could.”

“Well, what’s made the change?” Katherine
demanded.

Iva Belmington and Hazel Pilcher waved magnificently
toward the overladen vases and water
pitchers. “Those,” they said simply.

And at the same time Peggy poured a shower
of cards into her lap, and, taking them up, she
read, one after the other, the names of all the
six boys from Amherst who had come to their
dance that afternoon.

“Wasn’t it *lovely*?” cried Peggy. “They evidently
left the order at the florist’s when they
drove through the town. Look at Jim’s card,
Katherine, he wrote something on it.”

From the assortment in her lap, Katherine selected
the card which read Mr. James Huntington
Smith, and there sure enough across the top
of it were the words in pencil, “With appreciation
for a very jolly afternoon.”

“Well,—but they must have seen, just the
same,” hinted the practical Katherine.

“Oh, but they didn’t *mind*!” returned her radiant
room-mate.

.. File: 206.png

CHAPTER X—TINSEL AND SPANGLES
=============================

“My mother is coming.”

Lilian Moore made the announcement to
Peggy in a tone of mingled joy and reluctance.

The Christmas holidays were over and the
fearsome midyear examinations were things of
the past. The dullest of the three terms had settled
into full swing—day after day of white earth
and grey sky.

The Ambler House girls had been having a
Wednesday evening frolic down in the parlor,
with the piano banging and gay voices shouting
out their musical defiance of dullness in general.

“She writes that she’s coming for just a day
to see a little bit of college for herself,” went on
Lilian. “Peggy—she’ll—be disappointed in—my
grandeur. You see, I raved so about everything
when I was home at Christmas time. I guess it
may hurt her feelings to see that I’m not—one of
the foremost people in my class.”

Lilian essayed a laugh that broke into a sob.

Myra Whitewell, who stood near, impatiently
turned away. “I never knew anybody to be so incessantly
humble in my life. You really do make
me tired, Lilian. Haven’t we all liked you for
a long time——? You young Stupid, don’t you
know that we all have to take *some* steps toward
popularity ourselves? Don’t you know that we
are *all* outsiders when we come here, and it depends
at least *partly* on ourselves whether we
ever become insiders? You are always bringing
up the same thing.”

Peggy laughed at these two who had never
learned to become entirely reconciled to each other
even after all the close association of living together
in the same house. Myra was so impatient and so proud;
so well equipped with a good
opinion of herself, while Lilian was almost maddeningly
willing to be trodden under foot on
every occasion.

“Mother says maybe she can absorb a little
of college for herself,” Lilian mused, not heeding
Myra’s cutting comment, for she had grown used
to them.

“When is she coming?” asked Katherine, who
glanced around the room of singing girls, and
tried to imagine what impression it might make
on one who was not a girl any longer, and was
seeing it for the first time.

“To-morrow,” answered Lilian, with that same
note of doubt in her voice.

“Well,” said Katherine, her eyes still on the
shouting young women who rocked to the music
they sang, while the piano did its best to be heard
above them, “I think we can show her a good
time.”

.. File: 209.png

“Will you help me, girls?” cried Lilian, brightening
in sudden gratitude.

“Why, of course,” said Katherine, “any guest
of any of us is a guest of the house—that is, if
the one who is entertaining wants it to be so.”

“I haven’t much for to-morrow,” said Peggy
quickly. “I know you have several recitations,
Lilian,—we’ll see that she is taken care of every
minute from the time she arrives until she leaves
us, weeping.”

Peggy’s enthusiasm was beginning to carry her
away.

“Let’s go and plan out the hours,” she said to
the rest of the group—“just like those schedules
they publish in the papers of the way certain
great people—and criminals—spend their days:
thus, 9 a. m., has breakfast on tray; 10 a. m.,
sees dressmakers and milliners; 11 a. m., rides
in automobile, under guard——”

Lilian was laughing, all her doubts vanished.

.. File: 210.png

Even Myra entered into the plans with spirit.

And never had a celebrity been met by a more
enthusiastic crowd than was gathered at the
Hampton station to meet the frail and fluttering
little woman who stepped down from the 9:10.

Her eyes, shy and yet full of anticipation, were
searching for Lilian, who fairly flew down the
platform, the happy bevy of girls keeping close
behind.

After Lilian had kissed her mother, each girl,
as her name was spoken, wrung her hand with
such goodwill and welcome that poor little Mrs.
Moore realized that she would probably have
rheumatism in her fingers for days, as a result.
But her worn cheeks flushed with pleasure.

Whose would not, at such a reception when
she had expected to be merely a spectator during
her single day’s stay?

She was borne first to Lilian’s room.

Entering Ambler House, her eyes glowed, and
she turned her head to look after a merry group
that came running down the steps, their books
under their arms. Through the great hall, the
floor shining and smooth, with handsome rugs
to give color here and there—and up the broad
stairs the little procession wended its way.

And Lilian could hardly restrain a cry of surprise
as she and her mother, followed by the
faithful escort, stepped inside her room.

On the dresser was an adorable bunch of violets
with inviting purple pins beside it.

“Some one has sent you flowers?” cried little
Mrs. Moore, noticing these, even before she took
note of the dainty green and white curtains, and
the green denim couch cover, that Peggy and
Katherine had been inspired to supply.

“No, they didn’t,” cried Peggy from the doorway.
“They didn’t send *her* the flowers,—look
on the card!”

And when Mrs. Moore picked up the card that
lay beside the pins, she read aloud, “For Mrs.
Moore; welcome to Hampton, from one of Lilian’s
friends, Myra Whitewell.”

If you could have seen the look of pleasure with
which the little woman lifted those fragrant flowers,
and with shaking fingers fastened them to
her girdle! Oh, precious first impression of college!
How it crept into her heart with the fragrance
of those violets—quite the nicest thing
that had ever come to her in her care-worn, workaday
life!

Lilian’s own face was suffused.

That Myra, of all people, should have been so
dear and thoughtful! And, a moment since Lilian
had been harboring a rather bitter and unkind
thought against the black-haired freshman.

For Myra was the only one of the Ambler
House “crowd” who had not been at the station
to meet her mother. Lilian felt hurt. But now,
she remembered Myra’s chemistry laboratory,
that was in full session at this moment—and to
her, also, a new feeling came with the odor of
those violets.

She thought, with quick gratitude, that nothing
she could ever do for Myra would be too much
now to repay her for that glad and surprised
light in her mother’s eyes.

“And now, Mrs. Moore, you’re going to be
handed from one to another of us, hour by hour,”
laughingly explained Peggy. “Your daughter
has some classes that she really feels she *must*
attend. Ordinary classes we could all cut with
pleasure, but Lilian’s this morning happen to include
math, and Lilian is—well, she doesn’t know
a triangle from a piece of fudge, Mrs.
Moore——”

She broke off, giggling, and fled down the corridor
to escape Lilian, who pursued with pretended
rage, at her daring thus to lay bare
her mathematical shortcomings to her trusting
mother.

“So,” Katherine took up the story of the adventures
that were to form Mrs. Moore’s great
day, “you are to walk with me, please,—if you
will, down Elm street and down West street a bit,
and Green street, and then you will have seen all
the part of town that belongs to college life that
is outside Campus—invitation houses, undesirables
and all. Then at eleven I shall turn you
over to Peggy and Hazel Pilcher, at the campus
gate, and they will show you through the new library
and chapel and the Art building annex.
That’s as far into the future as you are allowed
to peep.”

“It sounds very alluring,” murmured Mrs.
Moore, whose eyes were still bulging, from the
sight of her staid and quiet Lilian pursuing and
pounding the fair-haired Peggy.

The company of the girls was more to her
than the sightseeing itself, and she found herself
swept along by the gay hilarity of whoever happened
to be her escort. She forgot that her hair
was as grey as theirs was black or golden; she
forgot that she had believed her time for gaiety
was over.

In the big library she paused, hushed, before
the sight of many graceful figures bending in
silent absorption over the volumes that lay in
their laps or before them on the massive tables.
She could not guess, in her awe of such an intellectual
atmosphere, that fully a third of these diligent
readers were bowed over Arnold Bennett
and Gilbert Parker, instead of the volumes of
deep learning she fancied.

“I wonder if the matron will let me ask Mother
to the House to lunch,” puzzled Lilian, a little
later, when she met them, after the tour of the
campus was complete. “I haven’t had time to
ask her and there may not be a place.”

.. File: 216.png

“There will be lots of places, but your mother
and we won’t be there to fill them,” said Peggy
quickly. “Gloria has invited us down to Boyd’s
for a real party.”

“Beef steak and French fried potatoes—and
peas?” cried Hazel. “A real one?”

“That’s just it,” said Peggy, slightly disappointed
that her friend had been so quick to
guess. “How did you know? I was the only
one with Gloria when she telephoned the order.”

“How did I know!” scoffed Hazel, “as if anybody
that knew what was best would dream of
ordering anything else at Boyd’s.”

Boyd’s was the popular restaurant, where the
girls trooped in to luncheon whenever the allowance
from home seemed to justify such a luxury,
where they sat on Saturday evenings, their white
shoulders gleaming above the white silk, green
chiffon and blue crêpe de Chine of their very best
dresses.

.. File: 217.png

“Are we really—invited by—Gloria?” questioned
Lilian, halting before the luminous name
of the freshman president. “Isn’t that wonderful
of her to give a party for Mother!”

Gloria, adorable in white furs, met them at the
doorway of Boyd’s, and greeted Mrs. Moore with
her own delightful impulsiveness.

“I’m so glad to know you, Mrs. Moore,” she
said with that pretty earnestness for which Gloria
was famed throughout the freshman class. “It
was awfully good of the girls to let me have you
for a luncheon party. You know, mothers are
scarce around these parts, and if we can’t have
our own, we lie awake nights planning the best
way to ensnare somebody else’s, whenever one
comes visiting. So please excuse us if we act as
if you belonged to us all instead of just to Lilian.”

And Mrs. Moore looked straight into the clear-blue
eyes of the tall red-haired idol of the freshmen, and
said she was only too glad to be adopted
by any and all of her daughter’s friends.

Something went grey and blank in Gloria’s
wonderful eyes before her searching gaze, and
the lashes swept down. The tall, graceful figure
drew itself more erect, as if she were on guard
in some way. And Mrs. Moore dropped the
warm hand she had been holding, with a sigh.

The beautiful hostess led the way upstairs into
the dining room and was shown to a long table
that had been reserved for her.

With much throwing aside of velvet coats and
furs, the friends seated themselves around the
guest of honor and leaned forward, their elbows
quite frankly on the table.

Every girl was laughing and talking, with the
single exception of Gloria herself. As the little
luncheon progressed, with the whole table in a
happy uproar, Gloria’s abstraction became more
and more noticeable.

.. File: 219.png

Celebrities are entitled to their moods. So no
one spoke of Gloria’s for some time.

Then Peggy leaned over and whispered, “Come
back to us, won’t you?”

And Gloria’s face was swept with sudden color.

She turned startled eyes on Peggy’s laughing
face. Then she shook her shoulders as if she
might free herself from some unpleasant thought.

“I—wouldn’t be anywhere else—for a farm,”
she said.

“Oh, well,” murmured Peggy to herself, “it
wasn’t anything but my imagination. What
could Gloria possibly have to bother her? Maybe
she didn’t have her history or her Greek to-day.
She’s just the one to mind it a lot, if she
didn’t always excel in the classroom.”

After the wonderful ice-cream and the dear
little French pastries had been consumed, with
much delight by the girls and with wistful enjoyment
on the part of Mrs. Moore, the check
was laid by Gloria’s plate, with the deferential
air the waitresses always used to a very good
customer.

Gloria, without glancing at the total, motioned
for a pencil, and scribbled her name and the name
of her house across it.

Then she slid into the soft coat Katherine held
for her, and while Peggy and Hazel and Myra
were still busy patting Mrs. Moore into her
things, she moved idly toward the stairs, her eyes
glancing over the crowded dining-room as listlessly
as if she were not a celebrity at all. Hushed
groups watched her pass and admiration and affection
shone in fifty pairs of eyes.

“Honestly, girls,” she caught a distinct murmur,
“I just can’t talk while she’s going by. Did
you ever see anything so wonderful?”

“She’s the best-looking girl in college,” came
the rapt answer from another girl at the same
table.

.. File: 221.png

But this incense drifted past Gloria without
making any particular impression.

The first few days of her presidency she had
enjoyed with a frank egotism that had pleased
Peggy and had caused Katherine many amused
smiles.

But she was accustomed to it all now. There
is no class in college so breathlessly eager to bestow
devotion as the first class, and when the
admired person is one of their very own, an
added quality of loyalty and unswerving devotion
creeps in.

“I just don’t believe that girl ever did a mean
or silly thing in her life,” the voice followed
Gloria as she started downstairs, with the rest
of her party in her wake.

“I don’t believe she’d have any use for a
*minute* for a girl who didn’t live right up to her
ideals. You know, she’s one of the advantages
of college,—she and girls like her—we can see
what we *might* be anyway, even if few of us
really come within a mile of it.”

Was there a trace of bitterness about that vivid
and gracious mouth of Gloria’s? Did she really
hurry a little to be out of earshot of those praises
that, however ridiculous, would once have been
sweet?

At the foot of the stairs she waited for Mrs.
Moore. She bade her good-bye prettily, saying
she must remain downtown for some shopping,
and that she hoped they’d all see Mrs. Moore in
Hampton again—a great many times.

“My dear, I want to thank you for a *beautiful*
luncheon,” Mrs. Moore smiled up into the lovely
face with that quaint way she had. “I do indeed
wish I might stay right now, and live in town
somewhere so that I could get to know the girls
better. And I think a sort of Everybody’s-Mother
would be a good thing for many of the
students.”

.. File: 223.png

But if she had hoped to bring a hint of the desire
for confidence from Gloria she was disappointed.

Gloria’s eyes took on that odd grey blankness
again, and though she nodded politely and pressed
Mrs. Moore’s hand warmly, there was not a
trace of that electric circuit between them which
it was so easy to establish with Peggy and Katherine
or most of the other girls.

“She’s very cold—and proud,” mused Mrs.
Moore, glancing in a puzzled way at the retreating
back of Gloria.

Lilian was the sort of girl any one could understand.
When she felt badly she would cry,
when she didn’t she’d laugh. If she liked any
one, she showed it, and if she disliked any one
she nearly made faces at them, her distaste was
so apparent.

Gloria Hazeltine was a new specimen to Lilian’s
mother. She discovered with her woman’s
intuition that something was troubling the young
girl. She wanted so much to help her. But she
could do nothing before such icy reserve.

“What—happens to me now?” she turned to
Peggy and said, as they went to the outer door
of the restaurant. “I suppose we go back to the
college?”

“No,” said Peggy, peering anxiously down the
street outside. “No, your sightseeing goes on
from here. But I don’t see—what ought to be
here.”

“Have you ordered a machine, Peggy?” asked
Lilian in awe and happy expectation.

Peggy’s laugh rang out. “Well, not exactly
ordered it,” she explained, “but hinted for it. It’s
Jim’s, and he promised to bring it over from Amherst
and meet us here at 2 o’clock. He’s five
minutes late. That’s—oh, there he is. Come
on, Mrs. Moore, come on, Lilian and Katherine
and Myra Whitewell and Doris Winterbean.
Hazel, I’m sorry you have classes.”

Unselfishly she handed Mrs. Moore into the
front seat beside Jim, sure that it would add to
the interest of everything for her, to have this
good-looking young man explain things and deferentially
point out new attractions.

“Only an hour and a half, Jim. I want to get
Mrs. Moore back to go to Thirteen with me, and
Lilian has biology at that time. You don’t think
that’s so good a show class as Thirteen, do you,
Lilian?”

“Mercy, no,” hastily answered Lilian. “Not
so good a show class as any other. You don’t
want to see grasshoppers cut up, do you,
Mother?”

Mrs. Moore protested that she had no interest
in grasshoppers under any circumstances, so the
plan to hear Thirteen stood.

“We just want to show you as many of the
dear places we love to visit as possible,” said
Katherine, crossing her arms on the back of the
seat Mrs. Moore occupied. “We could never
walk to more than one, but with the machine you
can see a number. Only you mustn’t suppose
that we have machines when we see them. No,
indeed, we walk or we hire a nice old poky horse
and runabout from the livery stable. The horse
may be almost an extinct animal in other places,
but he’s still a great favorite up here.”

Thus she was whirled along the river road,
through their favorite picnic spots, from hamlet
to hamlet while tea-house after tea-house flashed
into view and were pointed out with accompanying
tales of affectionate or funny reminiscences
by the Hampton girls.

At one, a large and ugly cat was always to be
expected at every party. The woman who ran
the tea-house had taken for her motto, “Love me,
love my cat,” and its baleful green eyes watched
hungrily every mouthful that passed through the
patrons’ lips.

Doris remembered an afternoon when she and
Gloria and the great Mary Marvington, of the
Junior class, had taken tea there, and Gloria had
unwittingly put her foot on the cat’s tail under
the table, the cat howled, and Gloria sat stonily,
her face white, trying to think what that *awful*
sound could be.

“The cat *wouldn’t* stop howling, of course, because
Gloria *didn’t* lift her foot, and Mary Marvington
was in *hysterics*, so I leaned under the
table and removed poor Gloria’s foot from the
poor cat’s tail, and I think old Tabby is running
yet.”

Lilian, Katherine and Peggy screamed with
delight at Doris’ very much embellished story.

Mrs. Moore’s eyes were sparkling now, and
she almost had to pinch herself to realize that
she was, for the first time in her life, in college.

.. File: 228.png

When Jim set them down outside the big recitation
hall, where she was actually to attend class
with Peggy, she smoothed her coat with happy
anticipation, and perhaps the full wonder of
Thirteen came to this shabby little woman, with
grey in her hair, as radiantly as it came twice a
week to these Hampton girls, who picked up
snatches of everything under the sun, and who
learned without the miserable grind, an easy style
of writing that set them apart from the girls who
had never had Thirteen.

“If all their classes are like this,” thought Mrs.
Moore, “I should think they’d rave in their letters
about the school part of it more than anything
else.”

But alas! Their classes all like that! Only
one was like it. The others were too apt to be
nightmares of mathematics or agonies of Greek
tragedy and Lyric poets or merciless written lessons
in medieval history.

.. File: 229.png

Dinner at Ambler House was the next thing
on Mrs. Moore’s program, and she listened to
that roar of conversation and laughter that always
began as soon as grace had been said in the
dormitory dining-rooms.

Fifty-four girls, all talking and joking at once,
and yet one never heard a loud voice.

“They are nice girls,” thought Mrs. Moore.

After dinner it had been planned that Lilian
should have her mother alone until theater time,
when they were all going to a musical comedy
which happened to be in town that night, direct
from New York.

But Mrs. Moore, who noticed that Peggy was
already dressed for the theater, asked her quietly
to come also.

“It’s about your friend; I hoped I’d have a
word with you,” little Mrs. Moore began when
she and her daughter and Peggy were comfortably
propped against the cushions.

.. File: 230.png

“Myra?” asked Peggy, doubtfully, for she was
the only person who might possibly occasion the
sad and foreboding expression in the older woman’s
eyes.

“Myra!” echoed Mrs. Moore in astonishment,
fingering the violets at her waist, which had been
revived for wear to the play. “Myra! No, indeed.
No, it was Gloria Hazeltine I was troubling
over.”

Peggy laughed. “Oh, it would be very foolish
troubling over *her*,” she said; “she’s freshman
president, you know——”

“Yes, I know.”

“And the prettiest girl in Hampton.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“And she’s the best dressed——”

“Of course, my notions of dress are old fashioned,
but even I could see that.”

“And she’s rich——”

“Well, I can’t help it, Peggy; I saw into that
girl’s heart to-day—a mother can—even though
I’m not her mother—and she’s not happy.”

“Mother!” cried Lilian. “Why, Gloria is
simply bubbling with happiness. Don’t you think
anybody would be perfectly *radiant* who had all
she has?”

“I wonder if you couldn’t find it out, Lilian,
and see if you couldn’t help her in some way—she——”

Peggy brushed away the thought of the incongruity
of Lilian Moore, very much one of the
masses in Hampton, acting as confidante and
comforter to the lofty Gloria, whose position set
her up to twinkle before the worshipful freshmen,
star fashion.

“I don’t think anything is really bothering
Gloria,” she said gently, “and there’d be no way
for any of us to find out what it was if there
were.”

.. File: 232.png

And she changed the subject to the entertainment
before them.

Ambler House had taken the first row in the
balcony, for from this vantage point the girls,
their bare arms leaning on the polished rail, could
stare down and pick out their faculty friends and
their celebrity acquaintances, and, also, they got
a better view of the stage, and could hear the
music to better advantage than from any other
seats.

One of the girls of the house was given an
orchestra ticket and was thus bought off from
her position in the theater’s “rubber row,” as
their chosen place was most inelegantly called.

“Now, Mrs. Moore, I’ll just take your coat and
then you lean over and look at anybody you like.
Nobody minds being stared at. Everybody’s used
to it, and if a girl downstairs is wearing an
especially good-looking dress, she’ll stand up and
turn around and gaze about the audience for a
moment so that we can be sure to get its effect.
That’s what *always* happens,” Peggy explained
blithely to their guest.

Mrs. Moore hadn’t been to the theater often,
anywhere. So that, in itself, was a pleasure.
But to sit in a theater crowded with girls, all in
evening dress as they would have gone to a ball,
their throats and arms white in the glare of the
electric lights, was a never-to-be-forgotten experience.

The play was a dashing affair, all beauty and
melody, and the irrepressible audience hummed
the catchy airs between acts.

Also there was the customary promenade during
the intermission.

The girls from the balcony went downstairs,
and, threading their way through the crowded
aisles in which the girls were chatting, found the
seat of some friend and leaned gracefully near
her for a few moments.

.. File: 234.png

And the talk usually ambled along something
like this:

“My dear! Aren’t you crazy about it? Honestly
I never heard anything like that chorus—hm,
hm, hm, hm,——”

“Those costumes! My dear, did you ever see
anything so fragile? Perfectly hectic! But the
colors—I’d give anything to have a winter suit
made on that grey and silver *motif*——”

“Her voice!”

“His eyes!”

“That step they did was perfectly beautiful—don’t
you think we could work it out by ourselves?
Watch carefully if they bring it in again;
I can follow it all up to that little kick she does
and the half turn in the air——”

“What a perfectly stunning gown! Why in
the world didn’t you save it for Junior Prom?
Well, you may have others, but I’m sure I never
saw you in anything more becoming—it’s a *darling*,
Dotty; look at Helen’s *cute* gown!”

“They say this made an awful hit in New York—do
you think it’s true that May Hastings is
really going on the stage when she graduates?
Why, I should think her people would feel terribly.
But it would be a thrilling life, wouldn’t
it?”

With a final burst of music, the entire company
crowded the stage in one of those hurrahing
finales, and the girls from Ambler House
gathered up their wraps and made all haste for
the stairs.

Outside Peggy summoned a taxi, and Mrs.
Moore, Lilian, Katherine and herself climbed in.

“The station in time for the 11:10!” she called
to the chauffeur, and in an instant Mrs. Moore
was being whisked away from her one bright day
of college.

For she had not felt like incurring the extra
expense of staying longer, and Peggy and Katherine
had been unable to think of a tactful means
of arranging that part of it themselves. So they
had simply crowded all they could for her into
one day so that she would have a typical picture
of the rush of college life to take back to her
small town with her.

“Well,” said Peggy, holding up her face to be
kissed just as the train came in, “how did you
like college? What impression did it make on
you?”

And little faded Mrs. Moore clasped her hands
before her while her eyes shone mistily.

“Why, I think”—her voice came huskily
mingled with the throb of the engine—“it is better
than any of my dreams, and you dear girls
have been the best of all.” And then she kissed
Peggy.

.. File: 237.png




CHAPTER XI

A SERIOUS DISCUSSION

   | “Just one college,
   | And that’s the college we sing to:
   | Just one college,
   | And that’s the college for us!”


The egotistical song of Hampton came out to
Peggy from the door of Myra’s room when she
stopped before it on her way home from class.

A comfortable fudge-eating group looked up
from the Morris chair and the couch as she entered.

“’Lo, Peggy,” said Gertie Van Gorder, interrupting
the song and waving with a piece of
fudge towards an unoccupied chair. “Sit down,
Peg.”

“Can’t,” said Peggy. “Is Katherine here?”

“Nope,” said Katherine’s voice from behind a
pillow. “I’m up at gym having a—c-c—brr-r—”
the pillow was made to shiver—“a cold
shower!”

“Come on home, Kat, you wretch,” laughed
Peggy; “I’ve had a present from Mr. Huntington.”

“*Who*,” demanded Gertie, impertinently, “is
Mr. Huntington?—and why didn’t you have him
to our house dance?”

Peggy and Katherine laughed.

“He’s an old man, silly,—and one of my very
best friends; in fact, he sent me to college, and
his grandson is Jim that you all met, because I
*did* have him to the house dance.”

“Well, then,” pursued Gertie still inquisitive,
“what was his present?”

“Something good?” inquired Myra, sliding to
the edge of her seat.

“If it is, we’re all coming,” smiled Gertie graciously.

.. File: 239.png

“Well,” Peggy admitted, “it’s—salted almonds.
Five pounds of them—I suppose———”

But she was the last one in the room. The
group had fled with a rushing sound down the
hall and were already murmuring their appreciation
in Suite 22.

“Save *some* for me,” mocked Peggy, when she
overtook them.

“Nice Mr. Huntington,” said Gertie amiably,
“nice, poor cheated Peggy. Her shall have one—just
one, mamma said,—slap your wrists———”

“Gertie, I’m going to put you up on the hill
one of these days,” laughed Peggy. On the hill
was a certain state institution which visitors to
the town were always annoyingly mistaking for
the college.

“But then, visitors are always funny,” as
Gloria had once explained. “One of them asked
me where I came from and I said Iowa. She
looked at me a minute and then said, ‘Will you
please say that again?’ Obligingly I repeated
‘Iowa.’ ‘Isn’t that odd?’ she said then. ‘How
strangely you *do* pronounce it. Now *I’ve* always
heard it called Ohio.’”

At the thought of Gloria, the salted almonds
became bitter in Peggy’s mouth, and she made
a little face of distress.

“Kaddie, *do* you think Gloria isn’t as happy as
she might be?” she inquired of her room-mate.

With the quick facility of college girls for
jumping from the most inane and frivolous
pleasantries to the most serious attitude of mind,
Katherine answered thoughtfully.

“Peggy, how could she help being happy?”

This question certainly appeared a staggerer
on the face of things.

“Happy?” trilled Doris Winterbean, “Why, I
saw her yesterday going to vespers in the *loveliest*
Belgian blue velvet suit mine eyes have ever
beheld. Happy! My *dear*! I’m free to say that
if my own friend Self had been clad in such Consider-the-Lilies
raiment, *I’d* have gone to vespers
*dancing*!”

“Don’t be silly,” said Peggy.

“Well,” finished Doris defiantly. “Please satisfy
our curiosity and show us how such a suspicion
ever crept into that woolly little head of
yours.”

She dodged Peggy’s pillow as it came hurtling
at her with good aim, and then sat pensively with
hands clasped over her knees as if to listen to a
tearful tale.

“I’d never have noticed it, I admit,” said
Peggy.

“Of course not,” chorused the nut-eaters.

“You know,” interposed Katherine, “sometimes
I think people who aren’t in college, you
know,—like Mrs. Moore, just can’t imagine a life
like ours, all happy and independent and so arranged
that nothing serious could *possibly* creep
in to trouble us. So if a girl seems abstracted,
or just resentful of too close scrutiny, as perhaps
Gloria was, she is apt to jump———”

“No, no, I can’t believe that,” said the foolish
voice of Doris. “Mrs. Moore wouldn’t jump.
Anything that is less a tax on our credulity,
Kathie, but not that,—not *jump*.”

“Take the nuts away from that girl. They
are beginning to have a bad effect, in fact, nutty,”
shrilled Peggy.

“As I was going to say,” continued Katherine
imperturbably, “people like Mrs. Moore
jump at conclusions———”

“O-oh,” murmured Doris. “That explains
it. I wish you’d said that before. It’s quite all
right, Kathie, now that you’ve made yourself
clear. The fault was all mine.”

“Doris,” snapped Myra Whitewell, pinching
her, “will you be serious?”

“I’m so serious, I’m going home. You hurt.”

.. File: 243.png

“Oh, Doris, do come back; don’t act like—like———”

“Like a freshman, I suppose? Well, I am a
freshman. And I guess I will go back to my
room and be serious all by myself.”

“You needn’t go and be mad, Doris.”

“Well, you needn’t pinch me.”

Such comic dismay was registered on the faces
of the group that Doris’ intention to play the
spoilsport fled in a burst of laughter from her
pouting lips.

“*Gooses*!” she cried at them.

“Doris, you mean geese,” corrected Myra, “but
it is no term to apply to a group of perfect ladies
anyway.”

They were back again in the favorite freshman
style of badinage, and the atmosphere that
had threatened to become tense was eased perfectly.

“To go back———” began Peggy.

.. File: 244.png

   | “I want to go back,
   | I want to go back to the farm!”

The rippling notes of irresponsible song came
from Gertie.

“Do you think there’s any intelligence in this
group of highly cultured persons?” complained
Peggy. “Because I don’t. I wanted to have you
girls help me about a real problem——”

“But not our problem, Peggy,” reminded
Katherine; “in fact it’s none of our business.”

“It’s Glory’s, Glory’s, hallelujah’s,” chanted
Doris as an apropos contribution to the talk.

“Oh, I never heard anything so perfectly
baffling as you people,” cried Peggy in despair.
“Here I was going to have a serious discussion——”

“Serious discussion!” gasped Gertie Van
Gorder. “Quick, girls, pass Peggy some more of
her own nuts.”

Even while the box was being passed, the irrepressible
roomful took up the Hampton song
where Peggy had interrupted them when she
found them in Myra’s room.

   | “Just one college,
   |   And that’s the college we sing to:
   |   Just one college,
   | And that’s the college for us.
   | There’s neighbor Holyoke over the way—
   | There’s just one college for us!
   |   But she can neither dance nor play,—
   | There’s just one college for us.
   | Just one college,
   | And that’s the college we sing to.
   |   Just one college,
   | And that’s the college for us.
   | Oh, Vassar has a noble site—
   | There’s just one college for us!
   |   But men, men, men are her delight—
   | There’s just one college for us!”

.. File: 246.png

CHAPTER XII—THE AUCTION
=======================

“Peggy, look at that sign!”

The room-mates were standing before the students’
bulletin board down in the note-room.

“It’s bridge, I suppose,” said Peggy idly.

“Bridge! No, it isn’t. Look! it isn’t that kind
of auction.”

Breathlessly then they read the alluringly artistic
letters, and made out with difficulty:

.. class:: center

   | Auction!
   | Big auction.
   | Everybody come.

..

    Beautiful clothes, evening dresses, lingerie,
    furs, everything for the wardrobe of the college
    girl to be auctioned off positively second-hand.
    Money must be paid on the spot.

    --:sc:`The Weldon House Girls.`

“That’s Gloria’s house,” said Peggy.

“Yes,” said Katherine, “and all of those girls
have so many clothes they don’t know what to
do with them. I think it is an awfully good idea
to sell some of them this way.”

“I’ve never been to one of those auctions before.
Usually it’s just kept in the house. Each
girl sells what she doesn’t want, and any other
girl in the same house who has seen and envied
that particular garment can buy it. Donna Anderson
got some lovely evening slippers that way
in her house for fifteen cents, and when they
were cleaned they were just as good as new.”

“I can think of lots of Gloria’s things I’d like.”

“Yes, especially that Belgian blue velvet suit
the girls were talking about.”

Both girls laughed at the idea of Gloria selling
her new things.

“Don’t you worry about those girls,” said
Katherine finally, “they’ll just auction rags and
tatters and get good prices for them, too.”

“Have you got some spare money to go with?”

“A little—about seven dollars. At the rate
some of those sales are made, I ought to be able
to get quite a complete outfit for that.”

“And I’ve a little. I haven’t counted just how
much. But of course we can get some more from
the bank.”

When they trailed into Ambler House for
luncheon they found the greatest interest and
excitement reigning.

The auction was in the air, and nobody could
think of anything else.

“Just little tiny no-account auctions,—why,
some house is having one every day, but who
ever heard of a wholesale kind like this?” cried
Doris. “I certainly will be there.”

Since the sign, for all its artistic printing, had
neglected to say what day the auction would be
held, Ambler House sent a deputation over to
Weldon to find out.

Weldon House sent back word, “Saturday
afternoon, of *course*,” so that part of it was settled,
and approved by everybody.

Peggy and Katherine went in no small state
of excitement. It was a new kind of amusement
so far as they were concerned.

The freshmen from Ambler House were almost
the only members of the first class to attend.

The freshmen in other campus houses were
not so precocious as this singularly self-confident
crowd, and did not feel like rushing in where
something was going on that was beyond their
experience.

As soon as the Amblerites stepped inside of
Weldon House, they noticed a conspicuous poster
with a hand inked on it pointing, and the single
word, “Upstairs.”

.. File: 250.png

The matron of Weldon House was standing
before the sign with a curious expression puckering
her lips, when the gay little group swept
by.

Once upstairs, there was another poster, a
more helpful one, this time, “Go to Room 27.”

The upper hall was full of other anxious buyers
plodding their way in the direction indicated
by the guide-post. Room 27 belonged to a most
gracious Junior, Zelda Darmeer.

It was characteristic of Zelda that her walls
were decorated with the mottoes, “No studying
aloud,” and “Never let your studies interfere
with your regular college course.”

The auction was already in progress when
Peggy, Katherine and their companions stepped
inside.

It was being conducted on the most informal
lines. Whenever a girl had anything to auction,
she acted as her own auctioneer, and when the
others thought she had taken enough time, one
of them serenely set up in competition.

The chairs were piled with soft blue chiffons,
dainty white under-garments, and plumed hats
and mangey furs.

“Put this up, somebody. Who belongs to
this? Put this up. I want to bid on it!” One
of the guests was rudely waving a silver-spangled
scarf that had slipped from a chair nearby and
fallen at her feet.

“Yes, in a minute,” came a business-like voice,
“that’s mine. Only been worn three years, and
has got over two hundred perfectly good spangles
left on it. Only eight hundred came off.”

Peggy and the others joined the guests already
there, sitting quietly down on the floor in their
midst. For floors are vastly more used at college
than anywhere else except, perhaps, in the
nurseries. Few people realize the solid comfort
there is in floors. They are not simply objects
lying flatly and dispiritedly beneath our feet to
be trodden upon, but they make the most delightful
divans and seats in the world, and possess a
superior seating capacity.

At least that was the way the Hampton girls
found it, and during vacation time they often outraged
a parent or relative by proceeding to sit
down and be comfortable, if it chanced that
every real chair was taken.

That the goods to be sold should repose in the
chairs, and the customers should sit on the floor,
seemed highly natural to Peggy and Katherine,
and a very satisfactory economy of space all
round.

“Now this,” Zelda was standing on the wabbly
heap of cushions that constituted the platform,
“*this* is my well-known blue chiffon dress. Everybody
knows and can testify to its wearing qualities.
This dress has appeared at every dance and
reception since the opening of the term. It has
shown up regularly about four times a week, and
has been universally admired.

“Now this dress”—she held it up conscientiously
so that the light shone through it and it
was seen to be more or less in shreds in certain
places, but still presenting a pleasing ensemble,
nevertheless.

“There are the marks of honorable service
about this dress. It has lots of good times to remember.
I was never unhappy in it once, and
that’s a boast that any gown might be proud of.
Now, girls, I got this in Boston just before I came
to college at the beginning of this year, and I
went to Hollander’s for it and I paid eighty dollars.
I’m tired of the dress now, but there are at
least five good more wears out of it. It always
*looks* dear and *sweet* once it gets on. The price
of this dress is four dollars,” she wound up.

There were two ways of auctioning. According
to them, you either set your own price and the
bidders’ contest simply went on to see which
would be the first, or you offered the object after
the approved auction custom and the bidders ran
up the price as high as it would go.

Zelda had a conscience. Had she not held the
gown before the light in that frank fashion, the
beauty of the frayed garment might have turned
some freshman’s head to the extent of fifteen
dollars or more, and it had served its purpose
for Zelda—she wanted a few dollars spending
money, and getting rid of her old things was a
quick method of obtaining it.

When the price of the blue chiffon was named,
Lilian Moore nearly fell over on the floor. She
had been straining forward across Katherine
Foster’s knee, her eyes covetous and hungry.

She had not come expecting to buy anything.
She had merely “been dragged along,” as the
girls said, and she had hoped to find enough
pleasure in watching the others purchase the wonderful
second-hands.

But that pleasure was gone now. Suddenly,
as she realized that this wonderful, shimmering
blue butterfly of a dress was within her reach,
she burned with a sudden fire to have it.

For Lilian, who, under the Ambler girls’ teaching,
had come to get together a fairly good school-day
wardrobe at small cost, had never yet possessed
a real evening dress.

She had gone to party after party, reception
after reception and dance after dance, always
meekly and shamefacedly arrayed in the white
simplicity that had been her graduation dress at
high school the spring before. Now, staring her
in the face with soft blue intensity, was Opportunity,
and she meant to seize upon it.

“Me,” she cried out, like a child in her eagerness.
“I want it, Miss Darmeer. *Here’s* the four
dollars!”

.. File: 256.png

Her spending money for weeks was poured extravagantly
into Zelda’s hand, and the wonderful
gown was thrown lightly over her trembling
arm.

For a little while at least—until the gorgeous
thing actually dropped to pieces—she would appear
as well-dressed, as beautiful and as fragile
as the other girls, with her hitherto covered
shoulders glistening charmingly into view and
her arms bare and bright almost to the shoulder.

At this moment Gloria came in from her own
room, her fair face flushed, and her arms laden.
There was a curious hauteur, that was foreign to
her accustomed manner, clinging about her, somehow.

And the very first thing that she put up was
the wonderful suit of Belgian blue!

As she mounted the swaying pile of cushions,
her expression never softened to the hilarity that
the occasion had held up till now.

.. File: 257.png

The light gleamed over the wonderful blue of
the thing in her arms.

“A suit,” she began, in that voice the freshmen
worshipped, “a blue suit. Tailored to fit
me. Do for any tall girl. The lining is, as
you see, a good quality taffeta,” she turned the
coat conscientiously inside out, “and a blue silk
underskirt goes with the skirt. I’ve worn this
three times. I don’t think very many people saw
it, for it was only to chapel and vespers and——”

A laugh interrupted her. That was rather
scathing of her, those of her classmates who were
present thought. For they were required to attend
chapel and vespers and didn’t like the implication
that they neglected their duty.

“Kaddie,” whispered Peggy, “do you suppose
she’s got so many clothes—that—that three wearings
is—enough?”

She gasped at the very idea of such a thing.
The condition of the chiffon gown that Zelda
had sold was more like her own things by the
time she had done with them. She could not
fancy any one parting with something they had
scarcely become even used to yet.

“Maybe it isn’t becoming to her.”

“Oh, Kaddie!”

Katherine looked again at the figure of Gloria
with her blue burden over her arm and saw that
she had spoken carelessly.

The blue of the suit brought out the blue of
the eyes in a dazzling fashion. The triumphant
red and gold of Gloria’s hair and eye-lashes
flamed more like those of a Norse goddess than
ever.

“What am I offered? I can’t advertise”—(the
ghost of a smile did quirk her lips here for an
instant)—“as Zelda did, that this suit has known
only happy times. It’s—had to take its chances.
But such as it is—it’s ready for your offers.”

.. File: 259.png

She stood expectantly, the suit lifted a little on
her arm.

“Twenty-five,” lazily called a senior from the
back of the room.

“I’m offered twenty-five,” said the auctioneer,
“and I’m—still listening.”

“Thirty,” piped Hazel Pilcher eagerly.

“Forty,” jumped the senior’s voice from the
back of the room.

“Forty-one,” hesitated Doris Winterbean.

There was no more bidding. Doris opened her
check-book and wrote the sum which had purchased
the shining wonder that had lately been
the property of the freshman president. She
knew that suit had never cost less than a hundred,
and she was more than satisfied. Its
former wearing rather lent it grace than detracted
from its value, considering who the
wearer was.

“I was going to buy a new suit and a spring
coat for next term,” said Doris, “but this will
have to do instead of both now,—and I’d rather
have it.”

But nothing else that was put up by the others,
or by Gloria herself, brought anything like that
price—none even yielded so high a percentage
of its original cost.

Gloria offered waists, which went for prices
such as fifty cents, or, at the highest, a dollar.
Then she held up an adorable kimono, direct
from Japan, that all the girls had envied and
coveted. But beautiful kimonos are luxuries,
whereas suits of some kind are necessities. So
her sacrifice met with no such fortune as the blue
suit had called forth. Most of the girls didn’t
attend college auctions with their check-books.
Doris Winterbean was a single foresighted exception.

“Isn’t it terrible to see those beautiful things
going for a few pennies?” said Peggy.

.. File: 261.png

“It is,” nodded Katherine. “What can that
girl be thinking of?”

“Thinking of turning into a savage, I should
say,” Peggy speculated in answer. “You can see
she isn’t going to have many clothes left.”

“She looks as picturesque as ever, anyway,”
sighed Katherine. “It’s too bad there are not
more of our classmates here to see her.”

“Yes, she was certainly a lucky choice for president,”
agreed Peggy.

“Your choice.”

“Well, my choice first and the class’s afterwards,
and I’m sure we’re both proud of our
good taste.”

The radiant one was again holding up an article
of apparel before their interested gaze.

“Now, this,” she began her advertisement, “is
all of handmade lace——”

An imperative knock sounded on the door.

Every girl in the room started nervously. For
auctions, while not against any college regulation,
were not exactly the sort of thing that would
meet with a matron’s approval when indulged in
to the wholesale extent of this one at Weldon
House.

Perhaps that puzzled and anxious matron they
had seen downstairs had followed the directions
on the sign and was even now upon the threshold.
How annoying, when there were many delectable
and unsold articles still lying negligently
over the chair backs.

“Well,” cried Gloria, in the midst of her
harangue, “come in.”

But the door opened only a crack and a
muffled voice came through it.

Zelda Darmeer felt a certain responsibility
since it was her room, but she would literally
have had to wade through six rows of husky
girls to get to the door.

She stood up anxiously.

.. File: 263.png

“Peggy Parsons, go and see what it is, will
you, please?” she begged, her face dark with annoyance.

Peggy, by clutching at the knees and then the
shoulders of the girls on either side, arose with
difficulty and went out into the hall.

What she saw there made her shut the door
behind her.

The matron, just as they had feared, was
outside the door. But there was another woman
with her. A horrid-looking woman, Peggy
thought, very different from any one usually seen
in campus houses.

The matron’s face was troubled, and Peggy
felt instinctively that it was something more than
their reckless auction that was causing her uneasiness.

The other woman’s expression was sullen and
aggressive.

She came forward threateningly as Peggy came
out, but in a moment fell back with a scowl, as
the light from the window at the end of the hall
streamed more clearly over the little figure.

“That’s not Miss Hazeltine,” she said snappishly.

“No,” murmured the matron, still with that
look of doubt and distaste. “This isn’t one of
my girls at all. Are you—perhaps—a friend of
Miss Hazeltine’s?”

“I hope I’m one of her best friends,” said
Peggy quickly. “And”—with a quick smile that
said it all—“I’m a freshman.”

“Well, I—don’t know,” hesitated the matron.

The other woman frowned. “I want my
money to-day,” she demanded.

Peggy shivered as if she had suddenly been
brought in touch with something ugly and sordid,
something meant to remain without her share
of experience.

She was torn between the feeling that she had
no business, in justice to Gloria, to listen to any
more—and the desire, the need to keep Gloria
away from the menace of this woman’s eyes.

She felt that Gloria was even less able to meet
and cope with this strange un-college-like situation
than she, Peggy.

For Gloria seemed of finer clay, and she herself—what
was she but just an everyday young
person, glad to be alive and curious about everything
that life might hold,—happy or otherwise?

Perhaps Gloria would hate her for stumbling
upon a situation like this which didn’t concern
her.

“I think,” she said to the pained matron, “I
think I’d better get Gloria. She’s in there——”
Then, with an inspiration, she turned suddenly
upon the unpleasant woman.

“Won’t you go down to her room,” she questioned,
“Number 20, and wait until she comes?
I’m sure that would be better; then if she cares
to see you, she can find you there.”

“Oh, she won’t want to see me,” retorted the
woman. “I’ll just wait here. There ain’t any
other door to that room she’s in, is there?”

Peggy’s heart turned sick.

“I will send her out to you,” she said quietly.
“What is your name, please?”

“I’ll tell *her* my name,” answered the woman
ungraciously.

“I think,” observed Peggy in a low tone, “that
you had better tell *me*—wouldn’t that be best,
Mrs. Ormsby?”

She appealed to the matron for confirmation.

“Certainly,” agreed Mrs. Ormsby, catching a
little of Peggy’s quiet fire. “You shall at least
send in your name.”

“Well,” grudged the woman, with a hateful
smirk, “just tell Miss Hazeltine it’s Hart and
Bates’ Dressmaking Establishment.”

.. File: 267.png

“All right,” murmured Peggy, and laid her
hand on the door.

The matron bit her lip uneasily, and Peggy
turned the handle and went back into the babble
of bidding that was going on inside.

.. File: 268.png

CHAPTER XIII—FEET OF CLAY
=========================

“My Morning Glory,” thought Peggy, in her
heart as she stood among the auction guests.

A feeling of loyalty filled her as she found
with her glance the subject of the disagreeable
conversation that had just taken place outside
the door.

The freshman president, all unconscious of
impending disaster—or at least of its nearness—was
in the act of taking off the wonderful high
button shoes that she wore because one of the
girls had expressed a desire to buy them.

She was laughing at the incongruity of it, and
the light was dancing in her rose-shadowed blue
eyes.

“The clothes off our backs,” she was saying
gayly, “anything to please our customers——”

.. File: 269.png

And Peggy looked at the beautiful silk stockings
that gleamed on her feet when the shoes
were removed.

“Look out, Morning Glory,” shouted a merry
Junior, “there are some of your freshmen worshippers
present—and they say all idols have clay
feet!”

Peggy’s heart skipped a beat, and Gloria seized
the shoes uncertainly as if to put them on again.
The room burst into a shout of laughter, and
Gloria ducked her flaming head gracefully and
laughed with the rest.

“My shoes!” she cried, with the laughter still
in her voice, as she held them up for sale, “right
off the clay feet——”

“Gloria!” cried Peggy reluctantly.

“In just a minute,” answered the beautiful
girl, “I’m busy selling *these*. Do you want to bid
something? Then——”

“Gloria,” urged Peggy again, for she had
caught a faint but impatient tap on the door at
her back. She held the knob, and she felt it turn
under her grasp. She knew she was not as
strong as the horrible woman outside.

“There’s—somebody waiting to see you.”

Gloria paused, swaying on the uncertain heap
of cushions, with a flush of annoyance coloring
her face. Then all at once she looked directly
into Peggy’s eyes, and understood.

“I’ll come,” she said, quickly, dropping the
shoes with a thud on the floor, and descending
from the teetering platform.

“You haven’t sold those shoes to any one yet,”
reminded Zelda Darmeer; “they still belong to
you.”

“That’s so,” assented Gloria abstractedly, and
slipped into them.

With their button sides loose and flapping
grotesquely against her silken ankles, she shuffled
with what dignity she might towards the door.
Peggy took her hand from the knob, and Gloria
disappeared into the corridor.

There was silence in the room for a second
after she had gone.

Then the babble began again, not of bidding
this time, but of conjecture, laughter and jests.

“Mystery!” observed Zelda Darmeer, hunching
up her shoulders.

“Who *is* out there, Peggy?” some one demanded.
“Don’t keep us in suspense.”

“Yes, who’s there?” cried the others.

“The—the matron,” said Peggy, truthfully.
“She came up and——”

“Well, she needn’t blame Morning Glory for
this auction,” Zelda Darmeer started up; “I got
up this auction, with two of the people from the
first floor, to sell off our old duds. We didn’t
even know Glory was coming into it, but when
she heard it she seemed to be keen about it, so—but
it isn’t her fault and I’ll tell Mrs. Ormsby
so——”

She was forcing her way through the crowd
in good earnest. The six rows of girls were
stepped on and trodden under foot ruthlessly as
she proceeded towards the door.

Peggy again sprang into position as guard.
“Don’t,” she cried out, and then added in a more
natural voice: “You’ve got us all here, now go
on with the auction.”

“Oh,” said Zelda, mystified, but amenable, “all
right. I suppose she’ll be back in a minute, and
Ormsby can’t do much anyway.”

The auction went merrily forward, but Gloria
didn’t come back.

After an hour or so, when Peggy was sure the
woman must have gone and the trying interview,
whatever it was, must be over, she slipped
from the room and went fearfully down the hall
toward Number 20.

.. File: 273.png

She knocked on the door, and entered when a
cold “Come” sounded.

Gloria was seated shoeless on the couch, her
red-gold hair in disarray, a frightened, harassed
look in her wide eyes.

“Gloria,” stammered Peggy, “do you want to
talk to me?”

Gloria shot her a quick glance, searching, appealing
and yet at the same time resentful.

“It depends,” said Gloria. “Do you like me
very much?”

“Very much,” returned Peggy simply.

“Well, then,” flung out Gloria unexpectedly, “I
sha’n’t tell you.”

“Sha’n’t tell me—because I like you?” cried
Peggy indignantly. “Why, I never heard of such
a thing!”

“Do you like me as well as you do Katherine?”
the strange girl pursued.

A vision of Katherine, familiar, dear, loyal,—her
own room-mate, rose mistily before Peggy’s
eyes.

“No,” she said, truthfully, “of course not.”

“Oh,” Gloria answered, “then it isn’t like the
rest. Perhaps I can talk to you anyway. I know
that it was your efforts that made me president,
though, in the first place. Why did you do that?”

“Because I knew you were the girl for the
place.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“I think you have proved yourself to be all
we hoped, and more.”

“But you don’t—know about things.”

“I know a good deal. The freshmen swear by
you. They would follow your example——”

“My example!”

“Yes, and they couldn’t have a better pattern,
Gloria.”

“Oh, well, you are as bad as the rest. Please
go and leave me. There’s no use. I haven’t
anybody—go quickly, please——”

“Now, Gloria, you’ve been saying the strangest
things. From your very odd remarks I gather
that if I—didn’t like you much, you’d think that
made me a better confidante. Now, I can’t hate
you even to please you. I like you—awfully
much—and did from the moment you came into
our room at the beginning of the year——”

“It has nothing to do with my being president?”

“Not a thing in the world!”

With a little shuddering sob, Gloria reached
for Peggy’s hand, and in an instant her shaking
shoulders were held fast in Peggy’s reassuring
clasp.

“Everybody looks up to me so——”

“Yes,” said Peggy, “and they ought.”

“They ought not! Peggy, it wasn’t good for
me, such sudden prominence! At home where I
lived I was just one of a good many. I went
abroad and traveled around and did not have an
opportunity to establish much of a place for
myself with any group. My father and mother
are indulgent, but I’ve often heard my mother
say she wished I didn’t have red hair. And here
the girls are crazy about it——”

Peggy smoothed the radiant hair in question,
while a sudden smile curved her crooked little
mouth.

“Oh, Gloria, child,” she laughed, “I can see
your trouble isn’t going to be such a bugaboo
after all. Go on and tell me now.”

“And I’ve never managed my own money——”

“Now we’re coming to it,” thought Peggy.

“And, Peggy, you may not believe it, but we
aren’t so very rich, after all. I know that everybody
says I’m a millionaire, but—we haven’t anything
so very much, really. And I was always
the first one asked to contribute to everything—and
I had to give quite a bit as president——”

“Ye-es,” mused Peggy, “I never thought of
that side of it.”

“And I was expected to wear the most wonderful
clothes—I heard the girls make the remark
that Glory Hazeltine never wore the same evening
dress twice—and—and I was vain. I’ve
seemed indifferent, Peggy, I know, but in my
heart I was vain. I’m just beginning to find myself
out.”

“You’ve found yourself out wrong,” mused
Peggy aloud, “and you are no vainer than any
other girl would be in your position and with
your assets.”

“Well, then, I’m sorry for the others.”

“Your story is that you were fiendishly extravagant,
isn’t that all?”

“All? Oh, Peggy!”

“Well, most of us have that failing to fight—and
some have reasons to make it harder to win.
But anyway, girlie, that doesn’t seem very awful,
after all. You know how the stores are? The
dressmaking shops run after the popular girls
and beg for their trade and offer them special
prices and say, ‘Oh, my dear, I shouldn’t bother
about paying now—just let it go on the account.’
And the account seems so elastic—and you just
order a gown or suit whenever you imagine you
need one, and they are forever calling you up
by phone and saying they have something extra
nice——”

“I don’t know,” said Peggy thoughtfully; “I’ve
found most of the stores in this town wonderfully
lenient. They will carry an account on
and on, and if you pay once a year they’re satisfied.
It must be a great inconvenience to them
to handle such erratic accounts, but they know
the college girls are *all* honest and will pay sometime.”

.. File: 279.png

“And I could have paid *sometime*—but I dare
not tell dad. He would think running such accounts
was awful. This dressmaking place is
not like the other concerns. They—they hound—you——”

Terror filled the baby-blue eyes.

“Well, you should have told somebody when
you found it getting beyond you. I have quite
a bit of money each month, and I don’t know anything
I’d rather——”

“Oh, but I shall not need it now.” Gloria even
smiled in her realization. “You see, I’ve sold
everything I had for what it would bring, and—it
made enough, I am thankful to say.”

“Did you tell the woman?”

“Not how I got it, no. I endorsed Doris’
check and handed it over to her as if I had been
a princess——”

“I know your manner. Was she properly overcome?”

.. File: 280.png

“Well, no. In fact she said, ‘This is but a drop
in the bucket. I’ll have you persecuted.’”

“She must have said ‘prosecuted,’ Gloria.”

“Well, one or the other, the effect is the same.
She *has* been persecuting me.”

“Well, and then did you give her the rest?”
asked Peggy, desirous of hearing all of the
story.

“Yes, I poured into her hands the full amount
the bidders had given me in return for all my
beautiful kimonos, gowns, waists and underwear.”

“Sounds like an elevator call in a department
store.”

“Doesn’t it? But she didn’t know. She
counted it out and returned me two dollars and
said I’d given her too much. I was thankful
there had been enough. Oh, Peggy, Peggy, Mrs.
Ormsby saw it all. She is a brick. But I feel
so mean, so mean——”

.. File: 281.png

“You needn’t. Now you’ve learned, and you
can go around here in sackcloth and ashes and
you will be the ‘freshmen’s handsome president’
still. That’s what the upperclass girls call you.
So it will come out all right. And nobody guessing
anything.”

“You know,” Gloria was laughing through her
tears, “the reason I wouldn’t tell you was because
I couldn’t bear to risk seeing your stare of
disillusionment and loss of faith—in case you
felt about me as some of the others do. I don’t
know why they should, but they act as if I were
sort of superhuman. And all my worry about
your attitude for nothing! I’ve just been plain
Gloria Hazeltine to you all the time, haven’t I,
Peggy? And to Katherine. I’m—kind of glad.
It’s awful to have people holding such ridiculous
ideals about you.”

“No, it isn’t. When you’re graduated, you
will look back on it as something very precious—and
very wonderful. It is one of the best
things that can come to any one—such idealization
as you have met with at the hands of our
class. And the only way to do is to live up to it,
to make it as true as truth.”

“That’s what I was doing, in a way,” explained
Gloria woefully. “But only to the most material
side of it. I wanted to live up to their ideal
of me in wonderful clothes—in generous subscriptions,
and all that kind of thing.”

“Well, young lady, now you right-about face
and live up to the other side of it. They would
follow you and love you if you were as shabby
as our wash-lady. So you can go as simply
dressed as you want, and they will do nothing
but imitate you. It’s a wonderful power you
have, Gloria.”

Gloria brushed back the straying hair from
her tear-stained face.

“I never thought of that, really, Peggy,” she
said. “Do you suppose there is really a little
something worth while in me to call forth such
feeling on the part of the class?”

“A good deal,” said Peggy. “But not—exactly
what they think. You can be even finer than
they believe, though, if you’ll set about it.”

“I wish I were like you, Peggy,” wailed Gloria.

“Like me! Now, Gloria Hazeltine, you know
you don’t. Nobody expects me to be anything
very remarkable. They love me but they have to
love a lot of faults along with me. So they love
me and look *down*, and you and look *up*.”

“You’ve helped, Peggy. Instead of being
sorry and ashamed of myself and realizing that
I’m not as nice as they think, I’m going to turn
that energy to *being* as nice. Do you think I can
do it?”

“I’m not from Missouri—but I cling to their
motto, and I do believe you can fulfill it for me.”

“All right, I *will* show you. You and all of
them. I’m going to surprise you, Peggy Parsons!”

Peggy left her room with a little sigh.

“I’ve come to collect Katherine,” she poked
her head into Zelda Darmeer’s abode and said.

Katherine came hastily out to her, and the
two made their way to Ambler House, the several
purchases they had made carried loosely in their
arms.

When they were comfortably enwrapped in
the dear, restful, homelike atmosphere of their
own suite, Peggy gave Katherine a sketchy report
of her interview with Gloria.

“We’ve had to have our finger in two college
pies of very different flavors, Kathie,” she mused
when the tale was done. “Our first case was a
girl who didn’t have recognition *enough*—was
swamped under the weight of indifference and
criticism that met her here. The other has too
much and couldn’t stand it. She fell to pieces
under the burden of worship the girls insisted
on placing on her. It’s funny, isn’t it, Katherine?”

“Such weeps, such weeps,” laughed Katherine,
not without sympathy in her tone. “If only
everybody in college could have things evened
up for them as we have. We’re neither too high
nor too low. We have a lovely suite—each of
us has a—nice room-mate” (Katherine smiled
as she flung this little inclusive compliment at
herself), “and people like us a good deal, but
not so much that they expect more of us than
is humanly possible.”

“But I don’t think we’d be any different in any
situation,” judged Peggy. “Do you know, friend
room-mate, I’m afraid we’re hopelessly commonplace.”

“I believe you’re right,” Katherine agreed
stoutly, “and I’m glad *of* it!”

.. File: 286.png

CHAPTER XIV—SPRING TERM
=======================

It is worth while having come through months
of winter, full of varying fortunes, to wake at
last in the glory of Spring Term.

Spring Term! Those of us who have had it,—what
wouldn’t we give to be able to drift backward
for a moment and feel the wonder of Spring
Term around us again? Sweet with its apple-blossoms,
prodigal of its sunshine, giving away
New England in a strange manner, showing that
she possesses a wildness and radiance of youth
that for three-fourths of the year she denies.

For Spring Term is satisfaction. There is
enough of it. When its magic first comes to the
freshman she thinks there will be eons more of
Spring Terms.

.. File: 287.png

But there will not be. Only four of them in a
lifetime—during those years when the newness
of life is fresh, when the power to respond sings
through every girl’s heart its most exultant tune.

A more or less bony livery horse, perked up
for spring, with the inevitable runabout, stood
before each campus house’s back door in those
days.

When his hirers came down from their rooms,
they undid the knot about the hitching post and,
picking up the reins, slapped them on the beast’s
back and careened away, out into the wonderworld
their Hampton had become.

Red canoes began to flash across the bright
and shallow waters of Paradise.

Rubber-soled shoes slapped their way to the
tennis courts, and their wearers sat for hours
without any alleviating shade, just to have possession
of a court at last for sixty minutes.

“I don’t know *what* I’ve ever done to deserve
it,” said Peggy, leaning on her window-sill beside
Katherine, while the two looked out on it
all.

“I’ve heard the upperclass girls tell some of
our freshmen when they were homesick, ‘Wait
till Spring Term.’ Now I understand what they
meant,” returned Katherine slowly.

“Oh, room-mate, I am glad I belong to such a
world. Wouldn’t it be—wouldn’t it be *terrible*
to have Spring Term come along and be a senior—or
an *alum*?”

“Seniors graduate—I suppose they don’t realize
it’s all for the last time—maybe they do,
though. But alums!” Katherine caught her
arm and pressed it in an odd panic. “Do you
suppose we will actually some day be—that?”
she asked with a shudder.

Peggy laughed out into the sunshine. “Not for
ages and ages. Three years more—why, that’s
almost the same as forever. Katherine,” she
changed the subject suddenly, “I wish we had a
canoe! Watch those adorable ones on Paradise—see
the drops sparkle off that paddle—oh,
Kathie, let’s have one, h’mm?”

Katherine was immediately beside herself with
joy.

“We can get one second-hand from a girl down
at Weldon House,” she said joyously. “I heard
about it the other day.”

Peggy demurred. “I don’t want a second-hand
one,” she declared decidedly. “I want a new one,
that nobody has ever adventured in before us.
I don’t know how to paddle though, do you?”

“No, except that the girl at Weldon that wants
to sell this one I mentioned took me out in hers
and sort of advertised it by letting me experiment
with the paddle awhile. I nearly tipped us
over and she was so anxious to have me buy the
boat she never said a word.”

Within the next few days Peggy and Katherine wrote
to Canada to see about the prices of
canoes. They labored long and hard in the gymnasium
pool and took the swimming tests that
were necessary for a college permit for canoe
ownership.

And then, sad, and sickening disappointment,
they found that freshmen weren’t allowed to own
canoes at all!

They left the boat-house with downcast eyes,
but the glory of the day soon made them lift
their gaze, and the first thing they saw was a
joyous crew of their classmates going to sea in
a moist-floored row-boat.

In a moment life was as full of promise as
ever and the two plunged down the boat-house
steps and gave their gymnasium numbers in to
charter the first craft of a similar kind that
came along.

“The water’s just as—wet, under this,”
laughed Peggy as they finally pushed off.

.. File: 291.png

“And the oars are just as hard to use as a
paddle,” cried Katherine, who had just dropped
one overboard. “Oh, thank you,—yes, we can
manage it all right; yes, *indeed*, we’ve had our
swimming test!” This last was to the boat-house
boy who rescued the oar and who seemed overly
concerned for their safe voyage.

“Paradise,” breathed Peggy softly, a little
while later, as they drifted under the shade of
the overhanging trees and looked up toward the
glowing green campus and the bright and exotic
botanical gardens of Hampton. “Only the river
is named that—but it’s *all* paradise. Oh, Katherine,
Katherine, I think we’ve had a happy
year, don’t you?”

But Katherine was not inclined at the moment
to be either poetical or retrospective. “Mercy!”
she cried out sharply, “now I’ve caught my oar
on a root!”

.. File: 292.png

The bright days sped all too fast. A few walks
around Hospital Hill, a climb up Mt. Tom, a
number of evening street-car rides when the girls
sat on the front seat outside the car just back
of the motorman with the wind blowing through
their hair, a jaunt or so to a distant tea-house,
a drive behind one of the bony mares, a few
negligible recitations and examinations—and—poof!—they
were gone like smoke.

The freshmen were urged to gather up their
belongings and hasten home as soon as possible
so that the campus rooms would be vacant for
that greatest drama of the spring soon to be
staged at Hampton—the commencement exercises
for the senior class.

“And you and I aren’t to see a bit of it,”
grieved Peggy to her room-mate. “I suppose
they are keeping it all a mystery from us until
we get nearer it ourselves. Don’t forget to write
to me often and *often* this summer, Kathie,—it
seems strange I’m not going to see you for so
long a time.”

“Yes, I’ll write, of course, child. I’ll miss you
and I’ll miss Hamp, but I’ll be glad to be home
for a while, at that. My mother wants me and
so do the rest of the dear folks. I’m so eager
to get there I don’t know what to do—and yet
my eyes are all full of tears at leaving, at the
same time.”

“Well, we ought to be laughing instead of
crying—neither of us got any conditions or low
grades except——”

“Now you needn’t remind me of that. I got
that low grade in botany because I couldn’t draw,
not because I didn’t know the lessons. It’s funny
if you have to be an artist for every course——”

“Never mind, Kathie, I barely came out on the
safe side of math. I’m going to have a bonfire of
my trigonometry and my old higher algebra as
soon as I get off the train at home. *They* shall
never cause anybody else such misery.”

“I’ll give you my botany book to throw in
with them.”

“All right, your botany book is elected to the
conflagration.”

“I know one thing that *won’t* go in.”

“What’s that, my dear?”

“A certain number of the *Hampton College
Monthly*.”

A quick color swept over Peggy’s face.

Laughingly she caught her room-mate’s arm
and started with her on an expedition to round
up the freshmen of the house for a last half day
together while they still enjoyed their lowly state.

Florence Thomas, Myra Whitewell, Doris
Winterbean, Gertrude Van Gorder, Lilian Moore
and May Jenson they summoned out onto the
campus where they were all content to stroll,
arms intertwined, meeting other groups who
were, like themselves, bidding Hampton farewell
for the summer.

It was late afternoon, with the sun streaming
over everything and the houses and trees casting
their long quiet shadows over the grass, when
there drifted by a group of seniors, singing idly
one of their senior songs.

The music of it caught Peggy’s heart and she
shut her eyes against the tears. There were
senior celebrities in that group—girls whom she
had known very well by sight—whom she would
never see again. Part of college they had been,
and now they were humming their senior song
for the last time across that dear old campus.

How could they bear to leave—when it was to
be shut on the outside of the college gates always—except
as they flitted back through the
years in the doubtful and unenviable role of
alumnæ?

With a full heart Peggy was glad she was just
beginning, glad that she would shout for her
class’s red lion emblem at basketball matches and
polo ground for three years more, glad that she
was to return and buy, in the pride of her sophomoreship,
her little red canoe, glad that college
was still brimming over with experiences for
her, as yet untried and unguessed.

“Come quickly, Peggy,” cried Gloria Hazeltine,
passing the Ambler girls on a run, “Glee
club’s having a sing over by Seelye Hall. Hurry,
or you’ll miss some of it.”

Glad of the opportunity to be with so great a
number of girls once more before vacation, the
Ambler freshmen began to run too, and soon the
voices of the glee club carried to them.

Through the crowd that had gathered they
caught glimpses of the singers’ white dresses.

“They’re singing ‘Where-oh-where,’” cried
Katherine.

.. File: 297.png

And as the words of the familiar song were
wafted out to them, Peggy and Katherine smiled
their queer pride and happiness into each other’s
eyes, since for the first time the song applied to
:sc:`Them`.

   | “Where, oh, where are those verdant freshmen?
   | Where, oh, where are those verdant freshmen?
   | Where, oh, :sc:`Where` are those verdant freshmen?
   | Sa-afe *now* in the Soph’more Class!”

|
|
|
|
|

.. _pg_end_line:

\*\*\* END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEGGY PARSONS A HAMPTON FRESHMAN \*\*\*

.. backmatter::

.. toc-entry::
   :depth: 0

.. _pg-footer:

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