Betty Wales, Freshman

CHAPTER XX

LOOSE THREADS

Betty Wales had to leave her trunk half packed and her room in indescribable confusion in order to obey a sudden summons from the registrar. She had secured a room on the campus at last, so the brief note said; but the registrar wished her to report at the office and decide which of two possible assignments she preferred.

“It’s funny,” said Betty to Helen, as she extracted her hat from behind the bookcase, where she had stored it for safe keeping, “because I put in my application for the Hilton house way back last fall.”

“Perhaps she means two different rooms.”

“No, Mary says they never give you a choice about rooms, unless you’re an invalid and can’t be on the fourth floor or something of that kind.”

“Well, it’s nice that you’re on,” said Helen wistfully. “I don’t suppose I have the least chance for next year.”

“Oh, there’s all summer,” said Betty hopefully. “Lots of people drop out at the last minute. Which house did you choose?”

“I didn’t choose any because Miss Stuart told me I would probably have to wait till junior year, and I thought I might change my mind before then.”

“It’s too bad,” said Betty, picking her way between trunk trays and piles of miscellaneous débris to the door. “I think I shall stop on my way home and get a man to move my furniture right over to the Hilton.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I’d got into the Hilton house too!” said Helen with a sigh of resignation. “Then perhaps we could room together.”

“Yes,” said Betty politely, closing the door after her. Under the circumstances it was not necessary to explain that Alice Waite and she had other plans for the next year.

It was a relief to stop trying to circumvent the laws of nature by forcing two objects into the space that one will fill–which is the cardinal principle of the college girl’s June packing–and Betty strolled slowly along under the elm-trees, in no haste to finish her errand. On Main Street, Emily Davis, carrying an ungainly bundle, overtook her.

“I was afraid I wasn’t going to see you to say good-bye,” she said. “Everybody wants skirt braids put on just now, and between that and examinations I’ve been very busy.”

“Are those skirts?” asked Betty.

“Yes, two of Babbie’s and one of Babe’s. I was going up to the campus, so I thought I’d bring them along and save the girls trouble, since they’re my best patrons, as well as being my good friends.”

“It’s nice to have them both.”

“Only you hate to take money for doing things for your friends.”

“Where are you going to be this summer?” inquired Betty. “You never told me where you live.”

“I live up in northern New York, but I’m not going home this summer. I’m going to Rockport – ”

“Why, so am I!” exclaimed Betty. “We’re going to stay at The Breakers.”

“Oh, dear!” said Emily sadly, “I was hoping that none of my particular friends would be there. I’m going to have charge of the linen-room at The Breakers, Betty.”

“What difference does that make?” demanded Betty eagerly. “You have hours off, don’t you? We’ll have the gayest sort of a time. Can you swim?”

“No, I’ve never seen the ocean.”

“Well, Will and Nan will teach you. They’re going to teach me.”

Emily shook her head. “Now, Betty, you must not expect your family to see me in the same light that you do. Here those things don’t make any difference, but outside they do; and it’s perfectly right that they should, too.”

“Nonsense! My family has some sense, I hope,” said Betty gaily, stopping at the entrance to the Main Building. “Then I’ll see you next week.”

“Yes, but remember you are not to bother your family with me. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. You just wait and see!” called Betty, climbing the steps. Half-way up she frowned. Nan and mother would understand, but Will was an awful snob. “He’ll have to get used to it,” she decided, “and he will, too, after he’s heard her do ‘the temperance lecture by a female from Boston.’ But it will certainly seem funny to him at first. Why, I guess it would have seemed funny to me last year.”

The registrar looked up wearily from the litter on her desk, as Betty entered. “Good-afternoon, Miss Wales. I sent for you because I was sure that, however busy you might be you had more time than I, and I can talk to you much quicker than I could write. As I wrote you, I have reached your name on the list of the campus applicants, and you can go into the Hilton if you choose. But owing to an unlooked-for falling out of names just below yours, Miss Helen C. Adams comes next to you on the list. You hadn’t mentioned the matter of roommates, and noticing that you two girls live in the same house, I thought I would ask you if you preferred a room in the Belden house with Miss Adams. There are two vacancies there, and she will get one of them in any case.”

“Oh!” said Betty.

“I shall be very glad to know your decision to-night if possible, so that I can make the other assignment in the morning, before the next applicant leaves town.”

“Yes,” said Betty.

“You will probably wish to consult Miss Adams,” went on the registrar. “I ought to have sent for her too–I don’t know why I was so stupid.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Betty hastily. “I will come back in about an hour, Miss Stuart. I suppose there isn’t any hope that we could both go into the Hilton.”

“No, I’m afraid not. Any time before six o’clock will do. I shan’t be here much longer, but you can leave the message with my assistant. And you understand of course that it was purely on your account that I spoke to you. I thought that under the circumstances – ” The registrar was deep in her letters again.

But as Betty was opening the door, she looked up to say with a merry twinkle in her keen gray eyes, “Give my regards to your father, Miss Wales, and tell him he underrates his daughter’s ability to take care of herself.”

“Oh, Miss Stuart, I hoped you didn’t know I was that girl,” cried Betty blushing prettily.

Miss Stuart shook her head. “I couldn’t come to meet you, but I didn’t forget. I’ve kept an eye on you.”

“I hope you haven’t seen anything very dreadful,” laughed Betty.

“I’ll let you know when I do,” said Miss Stuart. “Good-bye.”

Betty went out on to the campus, where the shadows were beginning to grow long on the freshly mown turf, and took her favorite path back to the edge of the hill, where she sat down on her favorite seat to consider this new problem. On the slope below her a bed of rhododendrons that had been quite hidden under the snow in winter, and inconspicuous through the spring, had burst into a sudden glory of rainbow blossoms–pink and white and purple and flaming orange.

“Every day is different here,” thought Betty, “and the horrid things and the lovely ones always come together.”

Helen would be pleased, of course; as she had hinted to the registrar, there was really no need of consulting Helen; the only person to be considered was Betty Wales. If only Miss Stuart had assigned her to the Hilton house and said nothing!

From her seat Betty could look over to Dorothy King’s windows. It would have been such fun to be in the house with Dorothy. Clara Madison was going to leave the campus and go to a place where they would make her bed and bring her hot water in the morning. Alice’s room was a lovely big one on the same floor as Dorothy’s, and she had delayed making arrangements to share it with a freshman who was already in the house, until she was sure that Betty did not get her assignment. Eleanor had applied for an extra-priced single there, too, to be near Betty.

Helen was a dear little thing and a very considerate roommate, but she was “different.” She didn’t fit in somehow, and it was a bother always to be planning to have her have a good time. She would be lonely in the Belden; she loved college and was very happy now, but she needed to have somebody who understood her and could appreciate her efforts, to encourage her and keep her in touch with the lighter side of college life. She didn’t know a soul in the Belden–but then neither did lots of other freshmen when they moved on to the campus. She need never hear anything about the registrar’s plan, and she could come over to the Hilton as much as she liked.

Nita Reese would be at the Belden, and Marion Lawrence; and Mary Brooks was going there if she could get an assignment. It was a splendid house, the next best to the Hilton. But those girls were not Dorothy King, and Miss Andrews was not Miss Ferris. It would have been lovely to be in the house with Miss Ferris.

Would have been! Betty caught herself suddenly. It wasn’t settled yet. Then she got up from her seat with quick determination. “I’ll stop in and see Miss Ferris for just a minute, and then I shall go back and tell Miss Stuart right off, for I must finish packing to-night, whatever happens.”

Miss Ferris was in, and she and her darkened, flower-scented room wore an air of coolness and settled repose that was a poignant relief after the glaring sunshine outside and the confusion of “last days.”

“So you go to-morrow,” said Miss Ferris pleasantly. “I don’t get off till next week, of course. Are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied?” repeated Betty. She had heard of Miss Ferris’s habit of flashing irrelevant questions at her puzzled auditors, but this was her first experience of it.

“With your first year at Harding,” explained Miss Ferris.

“Oh!” said Betty, relieved that it was no worse. “Why, y-es–no, I’m not. I’ve had a splendid time, but I haven’t accomplished half that I ought. Next year I’m going to work harder from the very beginning, and – ” Betty stopped abruptly, realizing that all this could not possibly interest Miss Ferris.

“And what?”

“I didn’t want to bore you,” apologized Betty. “Why, I’m going to try to–I don’t know how to say it–try not scatter my thoughts so. Nan says that I am so awfully interested in every one’s else business that I haven’t any business of my own.”

“I see,” said Miss Ferris musingly. “That’s quite a possible point of view. Still, I’m inclined to think that on the whole we have just as much orange left and it tastes far better, if we give a good deal of it away. If we try to hang on to it all, it’s likely to spoil in the pantry before we get around to squeeze it dry.”

Betty looked puzzled again.

“You don’t like figures of speech, do you?” said Miss Ferris. “You must learn to like them next year. What I mean is that it seems to me far better in the long run to be interested in too many people than not to be interested in people enough. Of course, though, we mustn’t neglect to be sufficiently interested in ourselves; and how to divide ourselves fairly between ourselves and the rest of the world is the hardest question we ever have to answer. You’ll be getting new ideas about it all through your course–and all through your life.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Betty rose to go. “I have to pack and I know you are busy. Miss Ferris, I’m going to be at the Belden next year.”

“I’m sorry you’re not coming here,” said Miss Ferris kindly. “Couldn’t you manage it?”

“Yes, but the–the orange seems to cut better the other way,” said Betty. “That isn’t a good figure, but perhaps you can see what it means.”

It was worth most of what it had cost to see Helen’s face when she heard the news. “Oh Betty, it’s too good to be true,” she cried, “but are you sure you want me?”

“Haven’t I given up the Hilton to be with you?” said Betty, with her face turned the other way.

Alice was disappointed, but she would be just as happy with Constance Fayles. She found more “queer” things to like at Harding every day, and she considered Betty Wales one of the queerest and one of the nicest.

Eleanor pleased Betty by offering no objection to the change of plan. “Only you needn’t think that you can get rid of me as easily as all this,” she said. “I shall camp down in the registrar’s office until she says that ‘under the circumstances,’ which is her pet phrase, she will let me change my application to the Belden. By the way, Betty, Jean Eastman wants to see you after chapel to-morrow. She said she’d be in number five.”

After “last chapel,” with its farewell greetings, that for all but the seniors invariably ended with a cheerful “See you next September,” and the interview with Jean, in which the class president offered rather unintelligible apologies for “the stupid misunderstanding that we all got into,” Betty went back to the house to get her bags and meet Katherine, who was going on the same train. Some of the girls had already gone, and none of them were in but Rachel, who was perched in a front window watching anxiously for a dilatory expressman, and Katherine, who was frantically stowing the things that would not go in her trunk into an already well-filled suit-case.

“Well, it’s all over,” said Betty, sitting down on the window seat beside Rachel.

“Wish it were,” muttered Katherine, shutting the case and sitting down on it with a thud.

“No, it’s only well begun,” corrected Rachel.

“A lot of things are over anyway,” persisted Betty. “Just think how much has happened since last September!”

“Jolly nice things too,” said Katherine cheerfully. She had quite unexpectedly succeeded in fastening the lock.

“Weren’t they!” agreed Betty heartily. “But I guess the nicest thing about it is what you said, Rachel–that it’s ‘to be continued in our next.’ Won’t it be fun to see how everything turns out?”

“I wish that expressman would turn up,” said Rachel ruefully.

“We’ll tell him so if we meet him,” said Betty, shouldering her bag and her golf clubs, while Katherine staggered along with the bursting suit-case.

As they boarded a car at the corner, Mary Brooks and the faithful Roberta waved to them energetically from the other side of Main Street.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” shrieked Katherine.

“See you next September,” called Betty, who had said good-bye to them once already.

“Katherine Kittredge has grown older this year,” said Mary critically, “but Betty hasn’t changed a bit. I remember the night she came up the walk, carrying those bags.”

“She has changed inside,” said Roberta.

As the car whizzed by the Main Building, Betty wanted to wave her hand to that too, but she didn’t until Dorothy King, appearing on the front steps, gave her an excuse.

“Well,” she said with a little sigh, as the campus disappeared below the crest of the hill, “you and Rachel may talk all you like, but I feel as if something was over, and it makes me sad. Just think! We can never be freshmen at Harding again as long as we live.”

“Quite true,” said Katherine calmly, “but we can be sophomores–that is, unless the office sees fit to interfere.”

“Yes, we can be sophomores; and perhaps that’s just as nice,” said Betty optimistically. “Perhaps it’s even nicer.”