Betty Wales, Freshman

“I almost think I’m somebody at last. Won’t Nan be pleased!” she reflected as she hurried home to keep her promise to Eleanor. Then she laughed merrily all to herself. “Those silly girls! I really didn’t do a thing,” she thought. And then she sighed. “I never get a chance to be a bit vain. I wish I could–one little wee bit. I wonder if Mr. West came.”

It did not occur to Betty as at all significant that Jean Eastman and Kate Denise had not spoken to her after the meeting, until, when she knocked on Eleanor’s door, Eleanor came formally to open it. “Jean and Kate are here,” she said coldly, “so unless you care to stop – ”

Jean and Kate nodded silently from the couch where they were eating candy.

“Oh, no,” said Betty in quick astonishment. “I’ll come some other time.”

“You needn’t bother,” answered Eleanor rudely. “They’ve told me all about it,” and she shut the door, leaving Betty standing alone in the hall.

Betty winked hard to keep back the tears as she hurried to her own room. What could it all mean? She had done her best for Eleanor, and nobody had guessed–they had been too busy laughing at that ridiculous Emily Davis–and now Eleanor treated her like this. And Jean Eastman, too, when she had done exactly what Jean wanted of her. Jean’s curtness was even less explainable than Eleanor’s, though it mattered less. It was all–queer. Betty smiled faintly as she applied Alice Waite’s favorite adjective. Well, there was nothing more to be done until she could see Eleanor after dinner. So she wiped her eyes, smoothed her hair, and went resolutely off to find Roberta, whose heavy shoes–another of Roberta’s countless fads–had just clumped past her door.

“I’m writing my definitions for to-morrow’s English,” announced Roberta. “For the one we could choose ourselves I’m going to invent a word and then make up a meaning for it. Isn’t that a nice idea?”

“Very,” said Betty listlessly.

Roberta looked at her keenly. “I believe you’re homesick,” she said. “How funny after such a jubilant afternoon.”

Betty smiled wearily. “Perhaps I am. Anyway, I wish I were at home.”

Meanwhile in Eleanor’s room an acrimonious discussion was in progress.

“The more I think of it,” Kate Denise was saying emphatically, “the surer I am that she didn’t do a thing against us this afternoon. She isn’t to blame for having started a landslide by accident, Jean. Did you see her face when Eleanor turned her down just now? She looked absolutely nonplussed.”

“Most people do when the lady Eleanor turns and rends them,” returned Jean, with a reminiscent smile.

“Just the same,” continued Kate Denise, “I say you have a lot to thank her for this afternoon, Jean Eastman. She got you out of a tight hole in splendid shape. None of us could have done it without stamping the whole thing a put-up job, and most of the outsiders who could have helped you out, wouldn’t have cared to oblige you. It was irritating to see her rallying the multitudes, I’ll admit; but I insist that it wasn’t her fault. We ought to have managed better.”

“Say I ought to have managed better and be done with it,” muttered Jean crossly.

“You certainly ought,” retorted Eleanor. “You’ve made me the laughing-stock of the whole college.”

“No, Eleanor,” broke in Kate Denise pacifically. “Truly, your dignity is intact, thanks to Miss Wales and those absurd B’s who followed her lead.”

“Never mind them. I’m talking about Betty Wales. She was a friend of mine–she was at the supper the other night. Why couldn’t she leave it to some one else to object to your appointing me?”

“Oh, if that’s all you care about,” said Jean irritably, “don’t blame Miss Wales. The thing had to be done you know. I didn’t see that it mattered who did it, and so I–well, I practically asked her. What I’m talking about is her way of going at it–her having pushed herself forward so, and really thrown us out of power by using what I–” Jean caught herself suddenly, remembering that Eleanor did not know about Betty’s having been let into the secret.

“By using what you told her,” finished Kate innocently. “Well, why did you tell her all about it, if you didn’t expect–”

Eleanor stood up suddenly, her face white with anger. “How dared you,” she challenged. “As if it wasn’t insulting enough to get me into a scrape like this, and give any one with two eyes a chance to see through your flimsy little excuses, but you have to go round telling people – ”

“Eleanor, stop,” begged Jean. “She was the only one I told. I let it out quite by accident the day I came up here to see you. Not another soul knows it but Kate, and you told her yourself. You’d have told Betty Wales, too,–you know you would–if we hadn’t seen you first this afternoon.”

“Suppose I should,” Eleanor retorted hotly. “What I do is my own affair. Please go home.”

Jean stalked out in silence, but Kate, hesitating between Scylla and Charybdis, lingered to say consolingly, “Cheer up, Eleanor. When you come to think it over, it won’t seem so – ”

“Please go home,” repeated Eleanor, and Kate hurried after her roommate.

CHAPTER XIII

SAINT VALENTINE’S ASSISTANTS

If Eleanor had taken Kate’s advice and indulged in a little calm reflection, she would have realized how absolutely reasonless was her anger against Betty Wales. Betty had been told of the official objections which made it necessary for Eleanor to be withdrawn from the debate. Her action, then, had been wholly proper and perfectly friendly. But Eleanor was in no mood for reflection. A wild burst of passion held her firmly in its grasp. She hated everybody and everything in Harding–the faculty who had made such a commotion about two little low grades–for Eleanor had come surprisingly near to clearing her record at mid-years,–Jean, who had stupidly brought all this extra annoyance upon her; the class, who were glad to get rid of her, Betty, who–yes, Jean had been right about one thing–Betty, who had taken advantage of a friend’s misfortune to curry favor for herself. They were all leagued against her. But–here the Watson pride suddenly asserted itself–they should never know that she cared, never guess that they had hurt her.

She deliberately selected the most becoming of her new evening gowns, and in an incredibly short time swept down to dinner, radiantly beautiful in the creamy lace dress, and–outwardly at least–in her sunniest, most charming mood. She insisted that the table should admire her dress, and the pearl pendant which her aunt had just sent her.

“I’m wearing it, you see, to celebrate my return to the freedom of private life,” she rattled on glibly. “I understand you’ve found a genius to take my place. I’m delighted that we have one in the class. It’s so convenient. Who of you are going to the Burton House dance to-night?”

So she led the talk from point to point and from hand to hand. She bantered Mary, deferred to Helen and the Riches, appealed in comradely fashion to Katherine and Rachel. Betty alone she utterly, though quite unostentatiously, ignored; and Betty, too much hurt to make any effort, stood aside and tried to solve the riddle of Eleanor’s latest caprice. On the way up-stairs Eleanor spoke to her for the first time. She went up just ahead of her and at the top of the flight she turned and waited.

“I understand that you quite ran the class to-day,” she said with a flashing smile. “The girls tell me that you’re a born orator, as good in your way as the genius in hers.”

Betty rallied herself for one last effort. “Don’t make fun of me, Eleanor. Please let me come in and tell you about it. You don’t understand – ”

“Possibly not,” said Eleanor coldly. “But I’m going out now.”

“Just for a moment!”

“But I have to start at once. I’m late already.”

“Oh, very well,” said Betty, and turned away to join Mary and Roberta.

Eleanor’s mind always worked with lightning rapidity, and while she dressed she had gone over the whole situation and decided exactly how she would meet it; and in the weeks that followed she kept rigidly to the course she had marked out for herself, changing only one detail. At first she had intended to have nothing more to do with Jean, but she saw that a sudden breaking off of their friendship would be remarked upon and wondered at. So she compromised by treating Jean exactly as usual, but seeing her as little as possible. This made it necessary to refuse many of her invitations to college affairs, for wherever she went Jean was likely to go. So she spent much of her leisure time away from Harding; she went to Winsted a great deal, and often ran down to Boston or New York for Sunday, declaring that the trips meant nothing to a Westerner used to the “magnificent distances” of the plains. Naturally she grew more and more out of touch with the college life, more and more scornful of the girls who could be content with the narrow, humdrum routine at Harding. But she concealed her scorn perfectly. And she no longer neglected her work; she attended her classes regularly and managed with a modicum of preparation to recite far better than the average student. Furthermore her work was now scrupulously honest, and she was sensitively alert to the slightest imputation of untruthfulness. She offered no specious explanations for her withdrawal from the debate, and when Mary Brooks innocently inquired “what little yarn” she told the registrar, that she could get away so often, Eleanor fixed her with an unpleasantly penetrative stare and answered with all her old-time hauteur that she did not tell “yarns.”

“I have a note from my father. So long as I do my work and go to all my classes, they really can’t object to my spending my Sundays as he wishes.”

Betty observed all these changes without being in the least able to reconcile them with Eleanor’s new attitude toward herself. Unlike the friendship with Jean, Eleanor’s intercourse with her had been inconspicuous, confined mostly to the Chapin house itself. Even the girls there, because Eleanor had stood so aloof from them, had seen little of it, so Eleanor was free to break it off without thinking of public opinion, and she did so ruthlessly. From the day of the class meeting she spoke to Betty only when she must, or, if no one was by, when some taunting remark occurred to her.

At first Betty tried her best to think how she could have offended, but she could not discuss the subject with any one else and endless consideration and rejection of hypotheses was fruitless, so after Eleanor had twice refused her an interview that would have settled the matter, she sensibly gave it up. Eleanor would perhaps “come round” in time. Meanwhile it was best to let her alone.

But Betty felt that she was having more than her share of trouble; Helen was quite as trying in her way as Eleanor in hers. She had entirely lost her cheerful air and seemed to have grown utterly discouraged with life.

“And no wonder, for she studies every minute,” Betty told Rachel and Katherine. “I think she feels hurt because the girls don’t get to like her better, but how can they when she doesn’t give them any chance?”

“She’s awfully touchy lately,” added Katherine.

“Poor little thing!” said Rachel.

Then the three plunged into an animated discussion of basket-ball, and Rachel and Katherine, who were on a sort of provisional team that included most of the best freshman players and arrogated to itself the name of “The Stars,” showed Betty in strictest confidence the new cross-play that “T. Reed” had invented. “T. Reed” seemed to be the basket-ball genius of the freshman class. She was the only girl who was perfectly sure to be on the regular team.

It is one of the fine things about college that no matter who of your friends are temporarily lost to you, there is always somebody else to fall back upon, and some new interest to take the place of one that flags. Betty had noticed this and been amused by it early in her course. Sometimes, as she said to Miss Ferris in one of her many long talks with that lady, things change so fast that you really begin to wonder if you can be the same person you were last week.

Besides the inter-class basket-ball game, there was the Hilton House play to talk about and look forward to, and the rally; and, nearer still, St. Valentine’s day. It was a long time, to be sure, since Betty had been much excited over the last named festival; in her experience only children exchanged valentines. But at Harding it seemed to be different. While the day was still several weeks off she had received three invitations to valentine parties. She consulted Mary Brooks and found that this was not at all unusual.

“All the campus houses give them,” Mary explained, “and the big ones outside, just as they do for Hallowe’en. They have valentine boxes, you know, and sometimes fancy dress balls.”

And there the matter would have dropped if Mary had not spent all her monthly allowance three full weeks before she was supposed to have any more. Poverty was Mary’s chronic state. Not that Dr. Brooks’s checks were small, but his daughter’s spending capacity was infinite.

“You wait till you’re a prominent sophomore,” she said when Katherine laughed at her, “and all your friends are making societies, and you just have to provide violets and suppers, in hopes that they’ll do as much for you later on. The whole trouble is that father wants me to be on an allowance, instead of writing home for money when I’m out. And no matter how much I say I need, it never lasts out the month.”

“Why don’t you tutor?” suggested Rachel, who got along easily on a third of what Mary spent. “I hope to next year.”

“Tutor!” repeated Mary with a reminiscent chuckle. “I tried to tutor my cousin this fall in algebra, and the poor thing flunked much worse than before. But anyway the faculty wouldn’t give me regular tutoring. I look too well-to-do. Ah! how deceitful are appearances!” sighed Mary, opening her pocketbook, where five copper pennies rattled about forlornly.

But the very next day she dashed into Betty’s room proclaiming loudly, “I have an idea, and I want you to help me, Betty Wales. You can draw and I’ll cut them out and drum up customers, and I guess I can write the verses. We ought to make our ad. to-night.”

“Our what?” inquired Betty in an absolutely mystified tone.

Then Mary explained that she proposed to sell valentines. “Lots of the girls who can’t draw buy theirs, not down-town, you know–we don’t give that kind here,–but cunning little hand-made ones with pen-and-ink drawings and original verses. Haven’t you noticed the signs on the ‘For Sale’ bulletin?”

Betty had not even seen that bulletin board since she and Helen had hunted second-hand screens early in the fall, but the plan sounded very attractive; it would fill up her spare hours, and keep her from worrying over Eleanor, and getting cross at Helen, so she was very willing to help if Mary honestly thought she could draw well enough.

“Goodness, yes!” said Mary, rushing off to borrow Roberta’s water-color paper and Katherine’s rhyming dictionary.

So the partnership was formed, a huge red heart covered with hastily decorated samples was stuck up on the “For Sale” bulletin in the gymnasium basement, and, as Betty’s cupids were really very charming and her Christy heads quite as good as the average copy, names began to appear in profusion on the order-sheet.

Mary had written two sample verses with comparative ease, and in the first flush of confidence she had boldly printed on the sign: “Rhymed grinds for special persons furnished at reasonable rates.” But later, when everybody seemed to want that kind, even the valuable aid of the rhyming dictionary did not disprove the adage that poets are born, not made.

“I can’t–I just can’t do them,” wailed Mary finally. “Jokes simply will not go into rhyme. What shall we do?”

“Get Roberta–she writes beautifully–and Katherine–she told me that she’d like to help,” suggested Betty, without looking up from the chubby cupid she was fashioning.

So Katherine and Roberta were duly approached and Katherine was added to the firm. Roberta at first said she couldn’t, but finally, after exacting strict pledges of secrecy, she produced half a dozen dainty little lyrics, bidding Mary use them if she wished–they were nothing. But no amount of persuasion would induce her to do any more.

However, Katherine’s genius was nothing if not profuse, and she preferred to do “grinds,” so Mary could devote herself to sentimental effusions,–which, so she declared, did not have to have any special point and so were within her powers,–and to the business end of the project. This, in her view, consisted in perching on a centrally located window-seat in the main building, in the intervals between classes, and soliciting orders from all passers-by, to the consequent crowding of the narrow halls and the great annoyance of the serious-minded, who wished to reach their recitations promptly. But from her point of view she was strikingly successful.

“I tell you, I never appreciated how easy it is to make money if you only set about it in the right way,” she announced proudly one day at luncheon. “By the way, Betty, would you run down after gym to get our old order sheet and put up a new one? I have a special topic in psychology to-morrow, and if Professor Hinsdale really thinks I’m clever I don’t want to undeceive him too suddenly.”

Betty promised, but after gym Rachel asked her to stay and play basket-ball with “The Stars” in the place of an absent member. Naturally she forgot everything else and it was nearly six o’clock when, sauntering home from an impromptu tea-drinking at the Belden House, she remembered the order sheet. It was very dusky in the basement. Betty, plunging down the steps that led directly into the small room where the bulletin board was, almost knocked down a girl who was curled up on the bottom step of the flight.

“Goodness! did I hurt you?” she said, a trifle exasperated that any one should want to sit alone in the damp darkness of the basement.

There was no answer, and Betty, whose eyes were growing accustomed to the dim light, observed with consternation that her companion was doing her best to stop crying.

As has already been remarked, Betty hated tears as a kitten hates rain. Personally she never cried without first locking her door, and she could imagine nothing so humiliating as to be caught, unmistakably weeping, by a stranger. So she turned aside swiftly, peered about in the shadows for the big red heart, changed the order sheet, and was wondering whether she would better hurry out past the girl or wait for her to recover her composure and depart, when the girl took the situation out of her hands by rising and saying in cheery tones, “Good-evening, Miss Wales. Are you going my way?”

“I–why it’s Emily–I mean Miss–Davis,” cried Betty.

“Yes, it’s Emily Davis, in the blues, the more shame to her, when she ought to be at home getting supper this minute. Wait just a second, please.” Miss Davis went over to the signs, jerked down one, and picking up her books from the bottom step announced without the faintest trace of embarrassment, “Now I’m ready.”

“But are you sure you want me?” inquired Betty timidly.

“Bless you, yes,” said Miss Davis. “I’ve wanted to know you for ever so long. I’m sorry you caught me being a goose, though.”

“And I’m sorry you felt like crying,” said Betty shyly. “Why, Miss Davis, I should want to laugh all the time if I’d done what you did the other day. I should be so proud.”

Miss Davis smiled happily down at her small companion. “I was proud,” she said simply. “I only hope I can do as well week after next. But Miss Wales, that was the jam of college life. There’s the bread and butter too, you know, and sometimes that’s a lot harder to earn than the jam.”

“Do you mean – ” began Betty and stopped, not wanting to risk hurting Miss Davis’s feelings.

“Yes, I mean that I’m working my way through. I have a scholarship, but there’s still my board and clothes and books.”

“And you do it all?”

Miss Davis nodded. “My cousin sends me some clothes.”

“How do you do it, please?”

“Tutor, sort papers and make typewritten copies of things for the faculty, put on dress braids (that’s how I met the B’s), mend stockings, and wait on table off and on when some one’s maid leaves suddenly. We thought it would be cheaper and pleasanter to board ourselves and earn our money in different ways than to take our board in exchange for regular table-waiting; but I don’t know. The other way is surer.”

“You mean you don’t find work enough?”

Miss Davis nodded. “It takes a good deal,” she said apologetically, “and there isn’t much tutoring that freshmen can do. After this year it will be easier.”

“Dear me,” gasped Betty. “Don’t you get any–any help from home?”

“Well, they haven’t been able to send any yet, but they hope to later,” said Miss Davis brightly.

“And does it pay when you have to work so hard for it?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Miss Davis promptly. “All three of us are sure that it pays.”

“Three of you live together?”

“Yes. Of course there are ever so many others in the college, and I’m sure all of them would say the same thing.”

“And–I hope I’m not being rude–but do girls–do you advertise things down on that bulletin board? I don’t know much about it. I never was there but once till I went to-day on–on an errand for a friend,” Betty concluded awkwardly. Perhaps she had been an interloper. Perhaps that bulletin board had not been meant for girls like her.

Miss Davis evidently assumed that she had been to leave an order. “You ought to buy more,” she said laughingly. “But you want to know what I was there for, don’t you? Why yes, we do make a good deal off that bulletin board. One of the girls paints a little and she advertises picture frames–Yale and Harvard and Pennsylvania ones, you know. I sell blue-prints. A senior lends me her films. She has a lot of the faculty and the campus, and they go pretty well. We use the money we make from those things for little extras–ribbons and note-books and desserts for Sunday. We hoped to make quite a bit on valentines – ”

“Valentines?” repeated Betty sharply.

“Yes, but a good many others thought of it too, and we didn’t get any orders–not one. Ours weren’t so extra pretty and it was foolish of me to be so disappointed, but we’d worked hard getting ready and we did want a little more money so much.”

They had reached Betty’s door by this time, and Miss Davis hurried on, saying it was her turn to get supper and begging Betty to come and see them. “For we’re very cozy, I assure you. You mustn’t think we have a horrid time just because–you know why.”

Betty went straight to Mary’s room, which, since she had no roommate to object to disorder, had been the chief seat of the valentine industry.

“You’re a nice one,” cried Katherine, “staying off like this when to-day is the eleventh.”

“Many orders?” inquired Mary.

Betty sat down on Mary’s couch, ruthlessly sweeping aside a mass of half finished valentines to make room. “Girls, this has got to stop,” she announced abruptly.

Mary dropped her scissors and Katherine shut the rhyming dictionary with a bang.

“What is the trouble?” they asked in chorus.

Then Betty told her story, suppressing only Emily’s name and mentioning all the details that had made up the point and pathos of it. “And just think!” she said at last. “She’s a girl you’d both be proud to know, and she works like that. And we stepped in and took away a chance of–of ribbons and note-books and dessert for Sunday.”

“May be not; perhaps hers were so homely they wouldn’t have sold anyway,” suggested Katherine with an attempt at jocoseness.

“Don’t, please,” said Betty wearily.

Mary came and sat down beside her on the couch. “Well, what’s to be done about it now?” she asked soberly.

“I don’t know. We can’t give them orders because she took her sign down. I thought perhaps–how much have we made?”

“Fifteen dollars easily. All right; we’ll send it to them.”

“Of course,” chimed in Katherine. “I was only joking. Shall we finish these up?”

“Yes indeed,” said Mary, “they’re all ordered, and the more money the better, n’est ce pas, Betty? But aren’t we to know the person’s name?”

Betty hesitated. “Why–no–that is if you don’t mind very much. You see she sort of told me about herself because she had to, so I feel as if I oughtn’t to repeat it. Do you mind?”

“Not one bit,” said Katherine quickly. “And we needn’t say anything at all about it, except–don’t you think the girls here in the house will have to know that we’re going to give away the money?”