“I THINK I SHALL LIKE IT HERE”

BETTY WALES
DECIDES

A STORY FOR GIRLS

by
MARGARET WARDE

AUTHOR OF

BETTY WALES FRESHMAN

BETTY WALES SOPHOMORE

BETTY WALES JUNIOR

BETTY WALES SENIOR

BETTY WALES B. A.

BETTY WALES & CO.

BETTY WALES ON THE CAMPUS

ILLUSTRATED BY
EVA M NAGEL

THE PENN
PUBLISHING COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA
MCMXI

COPYRIGHT
1911 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY

Introduction

Betty Wales and her friends appeared first in “Betty Wales, Freshman,” which told the story of their freshman year at Harding College. Eleanor Watson was in that group; so were Mary Brooks, Helen Adams, Roberta, the three B’s, and Katharine Kittredge, of Kankakee. Madeline Ayres made her entrance in “Betty Wales, Sophomore.” “Betty Wales, Junior,” and “Betty Wales, Senior” completed the undergraduate history of Betty’s class. “Betty Wales, B. A.” is the story of a summer abroad, where Betty met Mr. Morton, and “Babe” met his son. “Betty Wales & Co.” described the beginnings of the famous Tally-ho Tea-Shop, and “Betty Wales on the Campus” brought Betty back to Harding as the Secretary of the Student’s Aid Committee. She lived in Morton Hall, erected by the testy old millionaire because Betty’s work had won his sympathy and interest.

The “ploshkin” referred to in this story was at first a fascinatingly impossible little animal in a story that Eugenia Ford told Betty’s Smallest Sister, but Madeline Ayres saw its wide possibilities as a fun-maker, and Jasper J. Morton helped the girls put images of it on the market.

Contents

Illustrations

Betty Wales Decides

CHAPTER I
A SLUMP IN PLOSHKINS

It was a breathless August afternoon. Betty Wales, very crisp and cool in white linen, sat in a big wicker chair on the broad piazza of the family cottage at Lakeside. On the wicker table beside her were a big basket of family mending, a new novel, and an uncut magazine. In her lap was a fuzzy gray kitten. Betty Wales was deliberately ignoring the mending; she had been “perfectly crazy” to begin the new novel, but now she ignored that likewise; she had entirely forgotten the fuzzy gray kitten. She was busily engaged in the altogether delectable occupation, for a hot August afternoon, of doing nothing at all.

Jim Watson,—Eleanor’s brother, you remember, and the architect in charge of Morton Hall, also a warm admirer of Morton Hall’s pretty little manager,—had been in Cleveland for a week “on business.” The business was connected with two big houses that his firm were building there. It had left all his evenings and most of his afternoons wholly at the disposal of the Wales’s family cook, alias the pretty little manager of Morton Hall. The cook had rushed through her work in a scandalous fashion that caused the Wales family to indulge in many loud complaints of too-early breakfasts, “snippy” lunches, and wildly extravagant dinners—Jim always got out to Lakeside in plenty of time for the dinners. He had left for New York the night before, after the very most elaborate and delicious dinner of them all, and the Wales’s family cook was tired, though she did not know it, and happy, in spite of a queer lonely sensation that was hopelessly mixed with relief at having a long, lazy afternoon all to herself, to spend with a kitten for company, a book for diversion, and plenty of mending in case the unwonted joys of idleness should pall.

At four, when the postman came by on his afternoon round, Betty was still staring absently off at the blue lake, thinking vague, happy thoughts. She was so absorbed that she never even saw the postman, who obligingly walked across the piazza to her corner and dropped the afternoon mail in her lap, right on top of the gray kitten, who was too sleepy to care.

Just one letter, and it was for Miss B. Wales, the address typewritten, the name of Jasper J. Morton’s world-famous banking house in a corner of the envelope. It was from one of Mr. Morton’s secretaries,—not the Harding graduate that Betty had sent him, but an energetic young man who had been with the firm for several years. It was he to whom Mr. Morton had delegated the task of marketing ploshkins in New York and elsewhere, and he and Betty had become quite friendly over the checks and reorders and other business arrangements.

“I regret to state,” he wrote now, “that the ploshkin market has slumped. Our regular customers all report that they are ‘stuck,’ to use a technical expression of commerce, with the ploshkins they already have on hand, that the demand has entirely dropped off, and that they do not anticipate a revival of it.

“Mr. Morton has asked me to communicate with you, expressing his regret at the sudden termination of so profitable a business. (You will be amused, I know, to hear that the first thing he said was, ‘My, but that relieves my mind. It always worried me to think of people wanting to waste their money on those silly old splashers.’)

“Fortunately the spring sales used up practically all the stock you had on hand, so there will be no losses to meet. But there will also, I fear, be no more profits.

“Mr. Morton respectfully suggests that the ingenious young lady whose name he is unable to recall shall coöperate with you in inventing a new specialty. ‘Most anything will do if it’s only silly enough,’ in Mr. Morton’s opinion; and he will gladly arrange to market the product as he has the ploshkins.

“Hoping anxiously for such a renewal of our business relations, I remain,

“Most respectfully,
“Samuel Stone.”

Betty laughed heartily, all by herself, over Mr. Morton’s characteristic remarks. It was fortunate, she reflected, that when he was cross he was always comical. Otherwise she would never have made friends with him in Europe, and then he would never have built Morton Hall at Harding to please her, nor helped the Tally-ho Tea-Shop out of its very worst trouble,—nor sold the ploshkins. She smiled all to herself at Mr. Samuel Stone’s “anxious hopes,” and frowned as she contemplated the utter impossibility of making the ingenious young lady (named Madeline Ayres) invent a new “specialty” except by some such happy accident as had produced the ploshkin, that comically sad little creature, with an “ingrowing face” that smiled, a prickly, slippery tail, and one wing to hide behind, plaster images of which had been circulated, by the energy and enterprise of Jasper J. Morton and Samuel Stone, from New York to San Francisco, if not further.

And having laughed and smiled and frowned, Betty read the letter all through again, sat up straight in her big easy chair, and, choosing one of Will’s stockings, began to darn the very biggest hole in it. She wanted to think hard, and she could always think harder when her fingers were busy.

A slump in the ploshkin market meant no more ploshkin income. When she considered staying at home for the winter, Betty had counted on that hitherto prolific source of revenue to keep Dorothy on at Miss Dick’s, as well as to provide herself with necessary pin-money. Father wanted her to stay at home, but Betty wondered sadly if he realized how much she would cost! A girl doesn’t know about that until she has tried living on her earnings. Betty Wales understood just how fast little things will count up, try as you may to be careful. Father wasn’t yet back on Easy Street; Will had made a bad joke to the effect that Easy Street was certainly Hard Street when it came to getting a place on it again after you had carelessly slipped off.

“That’s true as well as funny,” Betty reflected sadly, “and the reason is that people who have been rich don’t know how to be poor. We’re still an extravagant family, no matter how hard we try to save. So I almost think—oh dear! I wonder if they do miss me much at home when I’m away! Because President Wallace is sure that Morton Hall will miss me if I don’t go back to it. I wonder if he’s right. I almost think—— Goodness, I should hate to seem conceited about it, because I know as well as anything that it’s perfect nonsense the way they all think I can do things that other people can’t. Anybody could do anything that I’ve ever done,—if they’d only try,” ended Betty Wales, with a fine disregard for antecedents and a serene lack of appreciation of the rarity of people who try—and who keep on trying to the bitter end.

If Dorothy didn’t go back to Miss Dick’s there would be two extra ones at home; that would put boarding, with five in the family, out of the question, and rents in town were frightfully expensive. It did seem as if a person who had a good salary waiting for her in Harding would better “go back on the job,” as Will would have put it.

A big, snorting motor-car slewed round a corner, with a silvery peal of its “gabriel,” glided swiftly down the street, and drew up with a lurch in front of the Wales cottage. Betty, her eyes on Will’s stocking, her thoughts working hard on the perplexing Harding-or-no-Harding problem, gave a little start at discovering that she was going to have callers. By the time she had dropped the stocking and carefully arranged the kitten in a comfortable little furry ball on a hammock cushion, the two ladies in the tonneau of the car had shed their protecting goggles, hoods, veils, and ulsters, and started up the path to the door.

“Nobody I know,” reflected Betty, going forward hospitably to meet them. They were both young-more likely to be Nan’s friends than Mother’s, and Nan was off spending a week with Ethel Hale Eaton. Looking more closely Betty decided that they must have mistaken the house; the pretty, overdressed girl with the huge plumed hat, and the more subdued young woman in a wonderful silk gown and a close-fitting toque, both in the very latest style, did not look quite like friends of Nan or indeed of any of the Wales family.

The girl was ahead as they came up the steps. “Is Miss Wales at home?” she asked in a sweet, assured voice, smiling a dazzling smile from beneath the big drooping plumes.

“Do you mean the real Miss Wales-my sister Nan?” Betty asked. “She’s away paying some visits. I’m Betty, the next youngest. Won’t you sit down a moment?”

“Thanks, yes,” the older woman, with the sweet, subdued face and manner answered. “And it ain’t your sister we want. It’s you. I’m Mrs. James O’Toole, of Paris, France, and that’s my girl Marie.”

“I’m very glad to meet you both,” Betty stammered. “That is,—I haven’t met you before, have I? I have such a bad memory.”

“No, you haven’t met us,” Miss Marie O’Toole told her with an amused giggle. “If you had, you’d remember. Even people with bad memories don’t forget Ma and me.”

“No?” Betty laughed back at her in friendly fashion. In spite of the plumes, too much jewelry, and an absurdly hobbled skirt, there was something very winning about Miss Marie O’Toole, with her pretty doll face and her sweet, thrilling voice. But Mrs. O’Toole was a curiosity. Betty had had to try hard not to jump when the demure little lady, dressed with such exquisite elegance, had opened her mouth and been suddenly transformed into a very ordinary person with a dreadful twang in her voice and a shocking lack of grammar in her conversation. She listened in blank silence to her daughter’s comment, and then handed Betty a card.

“That’s to interduce us. Has the letter followed?”

Betty stared in bewilderment. The card was President Wallace’s, introducing Mrs. and Miss O’Toole. “Letter will follow” was written after the names.

“Oh,” exclaimed Betty comprehendingly, “you are friends of President Wallace’s, and he is going to write me about—something. I’m very glad to meet any friends of his. Isn’t he splendid?”

“I think he’s a cross old bear,” returned Miss Marie O’Toole sweetly, “and Ma thinks he hasn’t ordinary common sense, don’t you, Ma?”

“Never mind about that,” said Mrs. O’Toole sharply. “But we ain’t any friends of his. The letter to follow is about Marie entering the college. I told you we had ought to have waited a while, Marie, for that there letter.”

Marie smiled blandly. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess we’re capable of explaining ourselves to Miss Wales.”

“I’m sure you are,” agreed Betty hastily. She was bursting with suppressed curiosity.

“Well,” began Mrs. O’Toole, “it’s like this. Marie wants to go to college. I can’t think why, but she does. She met some swell New York girls in Paris last winter, and they told her that it was all the rage. Of course,” added Mrs. O’Toole magnificently, “we know all the elect of the American colony.”

“She means élite,” explained Miss Marie with a giggle. “Hurry up, Ma, and get to the point of your story.”

Mrs. O’Toole sighed a patient, long-suffering sigh and continued. “So when we came across in June, Marie went right up to Harding and took the exams, and she failed in most of ’em. So then she was more sot than ever on her idee, and she hired a teacher to travel with us all summer—a girl that this President Wallace recommended. And last week she tried again and done better, but not good enough to suit.”

“The tutor was so tiresome,” explained Miss Marie with asperity. “She told me that I couldn’t possibly pass, so of course I couldn’t. Go on, Ma.”

“So then she was still more sot to go,” went on Mrs. O’Toole, “and she sent her Pa a tellergram and he——”

“You can’t tell that part,” broke in her daughter hastily. “Don’t you remember that he said not to—President Wallace, I mean?”

“Well, anyhow, nothing come of it,” said Mrs. O’Toole wearily. “But he finally sent us here, to say that if you’d undertake Marie she could come, otherwise not. She’ll be terrible disappointed if you won’t,” ended Mrs. O’Toole, “and if you will she’s willing to pay quite regardless.”

Marie giggled nervously. “That sounds as if I was buying a hat, Ma, or an invitation to an exclusive ball. President Wallace said that money was no object to Miss Wales.”

Mrs. O’Toole glanced sharply at the little cottage and then at the perfectly plain white dress that Betty was wearing, with its marked contrast to Marie’s furbelows. “Money is something of an object to any sensible person—except some college presidents,” she added pointedly.

Miss Marie O’Toole turned to Betty with a pleading smile on her pretty face. “I guess you understand what I mean,” she said, “and please do say that you’ll ‘undertake’ me.”

Betty looked perplexedly from one to the other. “But what am I to do?” she asked. “I don’t understand what you mean by that word.”

“There!” exclaimed Mrs. O’Toole triumphantly. “I told you we had ought to have waited for the letter.”

Miss Marie shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and turned to Betty. “President Wallace said that he was willing, under the circumstances——” Marie hesitated. “I suppose he meant my being educated mostly in a convent, where they don’t prepare girls for college, and being so ‘sot’ on coming, and so on. Anyway he said that under the circumstances he was willing for me to enter with one more condition than is strictly according to rules, if you would promise to tutor me as you did another girl once, and to look after me generally, and explain things that I don’t know about. He said he thought I would find a lot of things at college that I didn’t know about.”

There was a long pause. Of all the embarrassing situations, Betty thought, this was the worst. President Wallace was—it would be very disrespectful to say what. Besides, Betty realized in spite of her annoyance that President Wallace undoubtedly had had a good reason for sending the O’Tooles out to spoil her lazy afternoon. Part of the reason was probably because he had had to send them somewhere, or he would have them still pleading with him to reconsider his decision. Betty foresaw that Marie, being “sot,” would not give up easily; while Mrs. O’Toole, wanting Marie to have what she wanted, would be equally persistent. Betty decided that she needed a breathing space.

“I don’t know what to say,” she told them. “To begin with, I haven’t fully decided to go back to Harding this winter. If I do go, I shall be very, very busy with my regular work. I don’t really see how I can do more than I have already arranged for. But before I decide, I must wait for President Wallace’s letter. It may be about you, or it may be partly about Morton Hall—the dormitory that I shall have charge of if I go back. May I have a little time to consider? I really couldn’t say anything but no, if I had to decide to-day.”

Mrs. O’Toole sighed and looked reproachfully at Marie. “I told you so,” she complained. “You’re always in too much of a hurry. We might just as well have taken things easy and enjoyed the ride. We came all the way in our car, Miss Wales.”

“But I like to ride fast,” announced her daughter calmly. “Do you, Miss Wales? Because, if we’re going to wait around here for that letter, I’ll take you for a ride. Do many Harding girls have their own cars?”

Just then Tom Benson appeared on the piazza. Betty presented him, and Marie promptly dazzled him with her smile and bore him off to a distant corner of the piazza.

As soon as she was out of ear-shot, Mrs. O’Toole leaned forward in her chair and addressed Betty earnestly. “Do it if you possibly can,” she begged. “It’s a foolish notion she’s got that she wants to go to college, but there ain’t anything bad about it. It ain’t as if she wanted to go on the stage, or ride bareback in a circus, or marry some good-for-nothing fellow that wants her for her money. So I’m awful anxious for her to have her way. You see, Miss Wales, I know I stand in her light some. I know I ain’t a lady, though I do dress perfect,” she added proudly, “and look so young that people are always asking Marie about her pretty older sister. But looks and money ain’t everything, Miss Wales. And Marie is always so awful nice to me and her Pa, that we aim to suit her as well as we can.”

“Did Mr. O’Toole come to America too?” asked Betty, for want of anything better to say. She couldn’t help being touched by Mrs. O’Toole’s plea, but she didn’t want Mrs. O’Toole to know it yet.

“Oh, he’s always in America,” explained Mrs. O’Toole, “out at the mine, you know. But that’s no place for Marie, and her Pa knows it. He wants her to have all the benefits fits of education and foreign travel. We ought to be going, Miss Wales. Day after to-morrow, did you say? All right. You’ve been awful kind, Miss Wales. Come, Marie, we must be going.”

Marie came, slowly and reluctantly, with a backward smile for Tom Benson, and a murmured, “To-morrow afternoon then, and we’re staying in town at that big hotel with the queer German name.”

Betty watched them go as she might have watched the curtain dropping on the last scene of a tragi-comical play. Tom Benson broke into her revery with a laughing comment.

“Your friend Miss O’Toole is an accomplished little flirt, all right,” he announced.

“She isn’t my friend,” Betty told him severely, “and it takes two to flirt, Tom Benson. So, as a favor to me, you’re not to call on her in town. You can come over here and see her day after to-morrow if you want to. It looks to me as if I had been tumbled into the job of chaperoning her through the first half of her freshman year at Harding, so I propose to start her out right.”

“Why the first half of the freshman year only?” demanded Tom curiously.

“Because,” explained Betty, “mid-years come then—at Harding. Seems to me I have heard that they come about the same time at Yale, but I suppose they don’t worry a distinguished scholar like you.”

“The fair Marie doesn’t act particularly studious,” admitted Tom. “But you can’t ever tell about these pretty college girls.” Tom smiled meaningly at Betty, for whose brains he professed a vast admiration.

“Well, I wasn’t flunked out at freshman mid-years,” Betty told him, “but if I didn’t think Miss Marie O’Toole would find half a year of Harding all she wants, for one reason or another, I certainly shouldn’t be contemplating acting as her special tutor.”

“Are you considering it?” demanded Tom in amazement.

Betty nodded calmly.

Tom whistled. “Then I bet you have your hands full.”

“Well, I certainly hate having them empty,” returned Betty, beginning again on the stockings.

CHAPTER II
MONTANA MARIE O’TOOLE DAWNS UPON HARDING COLLEGE

Betty Wales always insisted that the O’Tooles’ visit had nothing whatever to do with her decision to go back to Harding.

“I see through you, Mademoiselle,” Will teased her. “You think you’ll be getting ready to be married about next year, and you’re taking your last chance to say a long farewell to your beloved Harding,—also to save your three-decker, secretary-tutor-tea-shop salary for a grand and elegant trousseau.”

“Will Wales——” began Betty fiercely, and then relapsed into haughty silence (accompanied by the faintest blush) as the only proper treatment of such unfounded accusations.

Nan was amused, and Dorothy relieved, of course, that her favorite sister was to be within call again. At first Mr. Wales agreed, rather soberly, that it would be foolish to neglect such good opportunities; but before she left home Betty had made him laugh so heartily at a few of her pet business theories, mostly adapted from Mary Brooks Hinsdale’s Rules for the Perfect Tea-Shop, that he accepted her decision as a huge joke—just another of Betty’s whims, having no painful connection with the ebb of the family fortunes.

But Mother, with the illogical perversity that is proverbially feminine, took the amazing position, for her, of Marie O’Toole’s ardent defender and champion.

“If you’re not going back chiefly on that poor child’s account,” she told her daughter Betty, “why, I’m ashamed of your unsympathetic nature. I never was so sorry for any one”—she had been present on the occasion of the O’Tooles’ second call. “She’s so sweet and pretty,—and so ignorant of all the things that other sweet, pretty girls learn from their mothers. She must know how strangely Mrs. O’Toole strikes nice people, but she doesn’t act annoyed or embarrassed, or try to keep her mother from making those dreadful remarks. Mrs. O’Toole says that they have never been separated, and that she doesn’t know how she can live next winter without Marie.”

“Betty thinks they can safely prepare for a grand family reunion after mid-years,” laughed Will.

“And then,” explained Betty practically, “I can have time enough to do justice to Morton Hall and”—very mysteriously—“to a lovely new plan that I have for the Tally-ho. Of course, as long as I’m going back anyhow, I won’t be mean enough not to ‘undertake’ Marie. But I hate having a lot of entirely different things to be responsible for, and I specially hate tutoring. I only hope this girl won’t cry all the time the way Eugenia Ford used to. It was fearfully embarrassing.”

“Tom Benson advises you to make her join an anti-flirt society first off,” Will put in solemnly. “He says it’s lucky Harding isn’t a co-educational college, because in that case it would take about two able-bodied chaperons to look after the gay Miss O’Toole.”

“Tell Tom Benson from me that I’m glad he’s at Yale instead of Winstead,” Betty retorted loftily. “A girl who wants to go to Harding badly enough to study all summer, take two sets of exams, and enter with three conditions hanging over her, isn’t as silly as Tom Benson seems to think.”

“Certainly not,” Mother defended her oddly-chosen favorite. “President Wallace must have seen her possibilities, or he wouldn’t have asked Betty to help her out. He evidently feels just as I do about her. I am sure that she has a naturally fine mind, and that she will respond very quickly to the cultivated atmosphere of the college. I doubt if Betty will need to do more than give her the most casual sort of instruction.”

Betty smiled to herself in the sheltering darkness of the piazza, where the family was spending the evening. Her private opinion coincided closely with Tom Benson’s, to the effect that even without the complications of co-education, Marie would be “a handful.” But President Wallace had hinted that he had a good reason which he was “not yet at liberty to communicate” for asking Betty to try to get Marie creditably through her freshman year; and, as Betty put it briefly to herself, it would be mean, just because it meant hard work, to refuse to do what the tragi-comical O’Tooles had set their hearts on.

So that matter was settled. The Students’ Aid work had developed so rapidly that Betty had petitioned for a senior assistant, and also, to the vast amusement of the Association’s managers, for a smaller salary for herself. Betty was bent on securing enough leisure to carry out her “lovely new plan” for the Tally-ho. Jim Watson may have had something to do with her feeling, or he may not; but, for one reason or another, Betty had what Madeline Ayres called a “leading” that this would be her last chance at Harding; and she wanted to “finish out” the Tally-ho, partly because she wished Mr. Morton to feel fully justified in his purchase and improvement of the property, but chiefly just to satisfy her own queer little sense of the fitness of things. The Tally-ho was capable of more than had ever yet been developed; and Betty liked people and institutions to do their very most and best. But the details of all this planning were kept a grand secret, even from the Smallest Sister, who had been the “Co.” in the Betty Wales business firm. Betty wanted to look over the situation at Harding first; then she would be ready to confide her conclusions to Co., Babbie and Madeline.

Betty Wales went back to Harding three days before the college opened, in order to get a good start with her work. But almost before she had stepped off the train she found herself up to her neck in a deluge of Students’ Aid affairs, all marked “immediate,” at least in the minds of the persons most concerned. It was a large factor in Betty’s success that she could always get the other person’s point of view; but there are occasions when this trait makes its possessor very uncomfortable. Betty wanted every girl who had applied for the Association’s help to get it, if she was worthy; she wanted every lonely freshman to be met at her train, every boarding-house keeper in search of waitresses, and every well-to-do student who hated to do her own mending, to feel that nobody could supply their varied wants so well as the Students’ Aid. The result was that one small secretary was shamefully overworked, almost forgot that she was supposed to be helping to run the most successful tea-room in Harding, and had no time to spend in worry over the probable bothers connected with tutoring Miss Marie O’Toole.

President Wallace was of course infinitely busier than Betty; all he had found time to do about Marie was to tell Betty, with a twinkle, that he had perfect confidence in her ability to manage “even the extraordinary product of a mining camp, a convent in Utah, a Select School for Wealthy American Girls in Paris, and the companionship of Mrs. James O’Toole; and to transform said product into a freshman that should be a real credit to Harding College.”

Whereupon Betty had gasped at the complicated things that were expected of her, laughed because President Wallace was laughing and seemed to expect that of her too, and then hurried off to find Miss Ferris and ask her if Mary Jones, the senior who lived in an attic at the other end of High Street, couldn’t somehow be persuaded to pocket her pride and come to fill an unexpected vacancy in Morton Hall.

She painstakingly met the train that Marie had written she would take; though either Marie had missed that train or Betty missed Marie. But with the capable assistance of Mary Brooks Hinsdale and Helen Adams she found Rachel and Christy, and Georgia Ames and Eugenia Ford found her. And the six of them, declaring that she looked tired to death and almost, if not quite, starved, bore her off to the Tally-ho for refreshment.

“Which is the biggest, most comfy chair you’ve got, Nora?” demanded Mary. “Bring us tea and the best little cakes you have for seven.”

“Better make it for fourteen, Nora,” amended Georgia. “I’m fairly hungry.”

And while the seven ate for fourteen, they all talked at once of “wonderful” vacations, “dandy” trips, “thrilling” summer adventures, each story ending with a rapturous, “And now aren’t we having a grand time here?”

“I must go and find that freshman,” Betty declared at last. She had said the same thing before, but this time she meant it.

“No, you mustn’t,” Georgia told her firmly, tumbling little Eugenia into her lap as a precaution against sudden flight. “You must tell me where she boards, and I’ll go and dry her tears, help her to unpack, explain about morning chapel and freshman class assembly, and tell her to meet you in—let me see—oh, the note-room in the basement of College Hall, at eleven o’clock sharp. She’s sure to be through by that time, and if you’re busy then, why, she can just wait for you.”

Betty listened to Georgia’s program in obvious relief. “Oh, Georgia, would you really do all that? You’re an angel! With so many other things on my mind, having to hunt her up seems like the very last straw. But Georgia—she’s—rather queer—not like other girls, I mean. She’s lived abroad a lot and her mother is—peculiar.” Betty tried to forewarn Georgia without prejudicing the company against the absent Marie.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” Mary Brooks Hinsdale reassured her. “Georgia will manage your freshman. Miss Ames, I hereby rechristen you Georgia-to-the-Rescue, and elect you to take extra-special care of our precious Betty Wales.”

Georgia blushed very red at being praised and “elected” to a mission by the charming Mrs. Hinsdale. “I don’t care how queer Miss O’Toole is,” she declared stoutly. “I guess I can make her understand a few simple messages. I’ve wanted to see the inside of that elegant new freshman hotel-affair where she’s staying. Go to bed early, and get rested, Betty dear.”

When the college clock began to strike eleven the next morning Betty reached for her rain-coat—the freshman downpour had duly arrived—to run over to College Hall and keep her appointment with Marie. But she had pulled on one sleeve, when Miss Ferris appeared to say that she had interviewed Mary Jones, who lived at the other end of High Street, and had persuaded her—it took fifteen minutes to tell what. Just outside Betty’s door Miss Ferris encountered Georgia Ames, red and panting. Georgia skilfully avoided a collision, slipped inside Betty’s office before the door had fairly closed upon the departing Miss Ferris, and dropped, breathless, into a chair.

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten your freshman,” she panted. “So I came to remind you. Don’t know why I hurried so. Only—she is entertaining the whole note-room, and it’s full of girls, and she is just screamingly funny, Betty, though I shouldn’t say so to any one else. But some of the other girls will pass on her choice remarks—the grind book will be full of her. And I couldn’t help liking her last night, so I thought I’d better come and remind you.” Georgia paused awkwardly.

“You know she just happens to be my freshman,” Betty explained smilingly. “I was asked to tutor her and look out for her a little. I liked her too, the little I’ve seen of her.” Betty had slipped on her rain-coat while they talked. “Come and help me find her, Georgia-dear-to-the-Rescue.”

The note-room is a notable Harding institution, time-honored and hedged about with inviolable customs. It gets its name from the four letter-racks, one for each class, that cover the long wall opposite the windows. The other walls are patched with Lost and Found and Want signs, and with notices of class and society meetings. A long table runs almost the length of the narrow room. On Mondays the janitor piles upon it the week’s accumulation of dropped handkerchiefs, for their owners to claim and carry off. On other days college celebrities may sit on it, swinging their feet comfortably while they beam on their admirers or wait to keep a “date” with one of their “little pals.” It is unwritten law that no freshmen save only the president, vice-president, and Students’ Council member may sit, or even lean, on the note-room table.

The note-room is always crowded between classes, and on this first disorganized, rainy morning it was a favorite rendezvous. As Betty and Georgia wormed a slow passage through the crowd near the door, they could see Miss Marie O’Toole, dressed, quite without regard for the weather, in a furbelowed silk gown, a huge be-flowered hat, and—of all things at Harding!—gloves, perched comfortably on the sacred table, between Fluffy Dutton and a clever little sophomore named Susanna Hart. Fluffy was all smiles and attention; Susanna’s black eyes twinkled with suppressed glee. Around the table surged a mob of girls, all amused but the freshmen, who were deeply and seriously interested in what was going on.

“Yes, I think I shall like it here,” Marie was saying in her sweet, piercing voice. “It’s so friendly and informal—not a bit like Miss Mallon’s Select School ‘pour les Americaines’ in dear old Paree. I’ve talked to lots of nice girls this morning. I can’t remember half their names, but they nearly all promised to call on me. You will too, won’t you?” She beamed impartially on Fluffy and Susanna.

“Maybe, if we have time. Got a crush yet?” inquired Fluffy sweetly.

“A what?” Marie’s face was blank.

Fluffy explained.

Marie giggled consciously. “You embarrass me, Miss Dutton. You go off and stand in a corner of the hall for a minute, and I’ll tell the rest of these girls whether I’ve got a crush or not,—and what her name is.”

Fluffy slipped obediently off the table, and then pulled the amazed Marie roughly after her. “Freshmen aren’t allowed on this table,” she announced sternly. “You’d better go home and read the rules of this college. There’s a rule about crushes, too. And about asking upper-class girls to call.” Then tender-hearted Fluffy relented and held out her hand. “I must go now,” she said. “But it won’t be against the rules for me to call on you, and I will. Where do you live?”

Marie explained, her gaiety somewhat subdued. Just then she caught sight of Betty and Georgia, who had at last succeeded in getting somewhere near the sacred table.

“Oh, Miss Wales,” she cried eagerly. “Here I am, and I need your help right away. Where can I find a set of the college rules—about calls, and crushes, and sitting on tables like this one, and so on?”

“And passing exams in freshman math.,” murmured Fluffy wickedly, hazarding a guess that Marie’s brain was not of the exact, scientific variety. “How do you do, Betty? I’m coming to the Tally-ho for tea and a talk to-night—Straight too. You’ll be there?”

Betty said yes, trying to look properly reproachful and not succeeding at all. Meanwhile the crowd had drawn back, old girls having whispered to the gaping freshmen that Miss Wales was a “near-faculty.”

“Shall we come over to my office?” Betty suggested, nodding right and left to girls she recognized. Marie covered her silken elegance with a natty white polo coat, and thoughtfully insisted on carrying the umbrella over Betty on the way back to her office.

“Just look at that, Miss Wales,” she began, as soon as they were seated, handing Betty a printed list of the accepted freshman candidates. “I’m in. I wouldn’t believe it till I saw it down in black and white. And I’m the only O in a class of two hundred. Isn’t that funny, Miss Wales?”

Betty looked sympathetically at the name of the only O in the freshman class. There it was, down in black and white: Montana Marie O’Toole.

“Oh, how f——” began Betty, who was fast being overwhelmed by the accumulating absurdities of her protégée. “Why, I—I thought Marie was your first name.”

Marie giggled. “I’m always called Marie—now. Ma would be awfully mad if she saw that ridiculous old Montana cropping out again. But they told us, when I took my first exams, to put down our full names. I asked if ‘M. Marie’ wouldn’t do, and the teacher in charge of the room just glared at me; so of course I wrote it all out in full about as quick as I could. You see, Miss Wales, I was born in a mining camp, and Pa named me after the claim where he’d struck it rich the very day I came into the world. The Montana Mary it was called. When I went to Salt Lake to school I dropped the Montana, and when I went to Paris I changed Mary to Marie. Marie suits me better, don’t you think so, Miss Wales?”

Marie got up to shed her heavy polo coat, and stood, a dazzlingly pretty vision, smiling down at Betty with the half-pleading, half-commanding curve of her lips that made her so winning in spite of her crudities.

Betty smiled back at her. “You’ll be Montana Marie as long as you stay here,” she told her freshman. “So you’d better make up your mind to it. The girls always seize upon a queer name and use it. If you’d written just Marie, you might have been nicknamed something funny; so it would come to the same thing in the end. Now may I tell you a few things, please?”

Betty repeated sister Nan’s suggestions to her when she was a freshman about not making friends too hastily. Then she arranged hours for special lessons, helped Marie with her schedule of classes, answered her frank queries about the desirability of being friends with Georgia Ames and Fluffy Dutton. Then she rushed off to settle the complicated case of Mary Jones, who lived at the other end of High Street, ate a hasty luncheon, held a lengthy conference with the Morton Hall matron, who had not the least idea how to hurry through her business, made a friendly call on “the Thorn,” a student who had given some trouble the last year, and whose mother had died during the summer. And finally Betty turned up, fresh and smiling, at the Tally-ho in time to take Emily’s place at the desk, while that young lady combined a marketing expedition with a drive behind Mary’s new thoroughbred.

At five Fluffy and Straight appeared and ordered tea at a table drawn sociably near to Betty’s desk.

“Please notice our senior dignity,” observed Straight. “We’re not going to be so harum-scarum any longer.”

“I noticed Fluffy’s senior dignity this morning,” Betty told them with a twinkle.

The two exchanged significant glances and then made a simultaneous rush for Betty’s desk, which they leaned over sociably, in the unmistakable attitude of those having confidential information to discuss.

“Please tell us if her name is really Montana Marie,” began Straight abruptly.

“And how you happen to have her under your wing,” added Fluffy.

“And then we promise to be very nice to her,” concluded Straight. “Besides, Fluffy says that she likes her.”

“We’ll be very nice to her anyway, if you want us to, Betty,” Fluffy explained sweetly. “But we’re just bursting to know about her and her beautiful name.”

“Just can’t put our minds on anything else,” murmured Straight sadly. “And I can’t afford to risk a mess of warnings this year after all the trouble I had with logic when I was a junior.”

“In short,” concluded Fluffy impressively, “Montana Marie O’Toole is the sensation of the hour at Harding College. Do you ask me to prove it? Watch the Dutton twins forget their cakes and tea while they talk about her.”

CHAPTER III
THE INITIATION OF MONTANA MARIE

Montana Marie O’Toole was, even as Fluffy Dutton had said, the sensation of the hour at Harding College. Indeed, she bid fair to be the chief sensation of the entire year of 19—. Her cheerful interest in the curious rites and customs of college life continued undiminished, in spite of elaborate snubs from upper-class girls and the crushing scorn of her fellow freshmen, who attempted, all in vain, to keep Marie (and so Marie’s class) out of the public eye. Nothing escaped Montana Marie’s smiling scrutiny. Her questions were frank and to the point. Her pithy comments were quoted from end to end of the Harding campus, and beyond. But her giggle was contagious, her sweetness really appealing, her appreciation of any small favors touching in its breezy Western sincerity. Montana Marie had “done” New York and the European capitals; she had been “finished” in “dear old Paree”; but she had also been born and brought up in a Montana mining camp, and she was not ashamed of that fact, nor of her very plain, as well as very peculiar, parentage. So Harding College agreed with Fluffy Dutton in liking Montana Marie. Its laugh at her was always friendly, if merciless, and in time it came to be even rather admiring. But that was not until long after the initiation of Montana Marie.

Susanna Hart planned that joyous festivity. Since Madeline Ayres had planned a similar one for Georgia and the Dutton twins and some of their Belden House classmates, and Betty Wales had explained and defended the Harding variety of initiation to an amused faculty investigating committee, there had been no official opposition to the hazing of freshmen at Harding. Hazing (Harding brand) was recognized as just an ingenious, “stunty” way of entertaining the newcomers, of finding out their best points, of helping them to show the stuff they were made of, and to take their proper places in the little college world,—in short, of getting acquainted without loss of time, or any foolish fuss and feathers.

So being initiated had speedily come to be considered an honor instead of a torment. All the most popular freshmen were initiated—in very small and select parties calculated to give each individual her due importance. And because of the extreme popularity—or prominence—of Montana Marie O’Toole, Susanna Hart decided that she should have an initiation all to herself. So she asked Marie to dinner at the Belden on a rainy Saturday night when there was nothing else going on. The initiation feature of the evening’s entertainment was not mentioned to Montana Marie; it was to be sprung upon her as a pleasant little after-dinner surprise. Susanna and her sophomore and senior friends in the Belden spent the whole afternoon arranging the “mise en scène” for the mystic ceremonies; and they made so much noise tacking up curtains and building a spring-board in Susanna’s big closet that Straight Dutton, who had a bad headache and was trying to sleep it off, came up-stairs, with rage in her heart, to find out what was happening.

Fluffy, who was acting as Susanna’s chief assistant, explained. “We thought you were asleep, so we didn’t come to tell you,” she ended.

Straight sniffed indignantly. “I was likely to be asleep—underneath this carpenter shop.”

“Stay and help us, and drown your sorrows in fudge and——”

“Noise,” finished Straight crisply. “No, thanks. I’m going to ask Eugenia Ford to massage my forehead. She’s wonderful at it. Tell me what everything is for, and then I’ll go back.”

Fluffy gleefully exhibited a glove full of wet sand which Montana Marie was to be induced to shake in the dark, as she entered the dusky Chamber of Horrors, otherwise Susanna’s single. There was a part of a real skeleton to run into; there were clammy things and hot things and wriggly things to touch; and finally there was the spring-board to fall from, down upon a heap of pillows, surrounded by a bewildering, fluttering hedge composed of Susanna’s generous wardrobe, carefully spread out on all Susanna’s dress-hangers, and those of some friends.

“She’ll never get out of that closet until we haul her out,” concluded Fluffy joyously. “Isn’t it going to be an extra-special initiation, Straight?”

Straight nodded in silence, reëxamined all the arrangements with polite attention to details, and departed, wearing the pained expression appropriate to one with a bad headache.

Five minutes later she was sitting cross-legged on Eugenia Ford’s couch, her cheeks still pale, but her eyes dancing with mirth and excitement.

“Of course I’m a loyal senior, and I ought by rights to be up-stairs with Fluffy helping the sophs,” she outlined her position rapidly. “But they’ve got enough help without me, and the racket did bother me fearfully, and made me mad, and besides, the juniors’ Rescue party that I’m going to organize will be a grand feature, so they really ought to thank me for seeming to bother them. How many juniors are there in the house, Eugenia? Well, Timmy Wentworth counts against two of the sophs, because she’s so big, and that big corner double room she and Sallie Wright have is the very best place in the house for our extra-special show. Now where can we borrow masks and black dominos? I have an idea that raw oysters dipped in hot chocolate sauce would taste rather weird. They never have had uncanny eats at the initiations I’ve been to, so that will be an original stroke. You go tell the others and buy the oysters and borrow chocolate and find the clothes and get the night watchman to lend you a lot of rope. I’ll take a nice little nap here on your couch, away from that sophomore racket, and at five we all round up in Timmy’s room to arrange.”

Having thus relieved herself of all minor details, after a fashion taught her by her good friend Madeline Ayres, Straight curled up among Eugenia’s downy pillows, and slept sweetly and very soundly until Eugenia and Timmy Wentworth shook her awake with the information that there were not enough black dominos and it was quarter past five.

The Belden House juniors appeared at dinner that night late and rather disheveled. Straight, because she had a headache, did not appear at all, and thereby missed seeing Montana Marie sweep through the Belden House parlors between the triumphant Susanna and Fluffy Dutton, the latter not too much worried about her twin’s unprecedented indisposition to miss any of the humors of the situation. For Susanna and her friends, being rather tired and hurried, and wishing also to be suitably clothed for darkling adventures in Susanna’s closet, had not dressed very formally for dinner. Against their background of shirt-waists and walking skirts or plain little muslins, Montana Marie sparkled radiantly in a clinging, trailing yellow satin, cut low enough to show the lovely curves of her throat and long enough to give just a glimpse of her high-heeled gold slippers and to lend her a quite sumptuous dignity among her short-skirted companions. A jeweled fillet held her piled-up hair in the exaggerated mode of the moment—it was becoming to Montana Marie. Diamonds sparkled at her throat and on her fingers. In short, Montana Marie was perfectly dressed for twenty-two and a formal dinner,—but not for a school-girl nor for any little after-dinner surprise in the way of an extra-special initiation party.

“It would be tragic to have to jump off a spring-board in those clothes,” Fluffy whispered sadly to a sophomore neighbor. “We’ll have to manage somehow to dress her over for the part.”

“She’s about my size; she can take my white linen with the braided trimming,” the sophomore agreed magnanimously. “It’s rather dirty, I’m sorry to say, but that’s really an advantage for to-night.”

“I’ll tell Susanna,” promised Fluffy, “and she’ll have to arrange. Why in the world didn’t she tell Miss Montana Marie O’Toole not to dress up like a princess?”

But Susanna, though she employed all her far-famed diplomacy, could not “arrange” any changes in her guest’s wonderful toilette. When she proposed a little walk in the rain, and said it would be a shame to risk spoiling that lovely dress, Montana Marie only smiled, and picked up her train.

“I shan’t spoil it,” she said. “I never spoil my clothes. But I’d love a walk in the rain—with you and Fluffy. Yes, or a fudge party up-stairs. Just whatever you say.”

And no amount of hints and polite protests could make Montana Marie change her mind.

So it was that, still smiling and still arrayed in clinging bejeweled yellow satin, Montana Marie shook hands with a gloveful of wet sand, at the door of Susanna’s Chamber of Horrors, stuck her arms through a hole in the Curtain of Variety, and shrieked as she grasped first a hot potato, then a large and lively lobster, and finally a paper snake freshly dipped in thick white paint by Fluffy, so that it would be sure to feel extra-crawly. Next, after she had assured her captors that she was enjoying it all,—they inquired at intervals according to the etiquette of hazing (Harding brand),—she was led up to the skeleton, which promptly tumbled over upon her with a gruesome rattle of dry bones. And finally came the spring-board and the cushions, hemmed in by Susanna’s hanging dresses, from behind which three little sophomores delivered horrible noises, accompanying soft, uncanny pats and pushes, while Montana Marie, still cheerful, though badly scared, minus one gold slipper, and quite helplessly entangled in her long train, struggled manfully to regain her feet and maintain her composure.

When they were tired of watching her try to get out, they turned on a sudden blaze of lights, pulled down the dresses that had been hung across the door, helped Montana Marie to arise, returned her slipper, and arranged her train.

Montana Marie blinked at the lights, and smiled blandly at the assembled company. “Nothing like this in dear old Paree,” she announced, gasping but happy. “Now at Miss Mallon’s Select School for American Girls——”

“Hush,” commanded Fluffy. “We aren’t interested in any silly little boarding-school stories. This is a grown-up college. But as you seem to want to talk, go ahead—make a speech.”

“GO AHEAD—MAKE A SPEECH”

“On the subject of the Fourth Dimension,” put in Susanna hastily. “We are all very tired of dear old Paree.”

“But I never heard of——” began Montana Marie.

“Sh!” commanded Susanna sternly. “If you say you’ve never heard of a thing like the Fourth Dimension, why, here at Harding that means social ostracism. To use simpler language suitable for very verdant little girls like you, not to have heard of the Fourth Dimension is a mark of complete and utter greenness, perfect and unbearable freshness, and even worse. If you haven’t heard of it, all right, but don’t say so, unless you want to be finally and forever dropped like—like a hot potato,”—Susanna glanced smilingly at the Curtain of Variety,—“by the best Harding circles. If you haven’t heard of it, why, bluff. Now don’t tell me you never heard of bluffing.”

“Well,” began Montana Marie, still smiling composedly, “you see I never heard of a lot of things that you do here, because I was mostly educated in a convent, I suppose. President Wallace understands that. That’s why he let me in when——”

Marie was too much absorbed in her speech, and her audience were too busy laughing at her confidential disclosures, to notice a slight commotion near the door. A second later the room was full of masked figures in black dominos. Two especially stalwart ones guarded the door. The rest drew a cordon around the amazed initiators and producing pieces of stout rope—procured, according to Straight’s directions, from the night watchman, who was under the impression that it was wanted by the Belden House matron for strange purposes of her own—they silently bound their prisoners, who were too astonished even to struggle, and started them in procession out the door and up the hall.

Suddenly a black domino cried, “Stop—I mean—halt, prisoners! We’ve forgotten something.”

For Montana Marie O’Toole still stood as she had been commanded to do to make her speech, on the quivering middle of the spring-board in the closet, viewing the performances of the black dominos with mingled surprise and amusement, manifested, as usual with her, by a smile, rather faint now, but still somehow infectious.

“We’ve forgotten the principal feature,” the voice went on. “Montana Marie O’Toole, get down. You’re no longer a persecuted little freshman. You’ve been nobly rescued by your junior protectors. Now come and see justice done on these base tormentors of youth and beauty.”

“All right,” agreed Marie calmly, scrambling down from her uncertain perch and losing off a slipper again in the process.

Susanna picked it up and handed it to her meekly.

“You’re a champion bluffer, if you don’t know what it means,” Fluffy told her admiringly. “I suppose you knew all the time that they were coming, and that was why you just giggled at everything and let us do our worst.”

Montana Marie O’Toole smiled vaguely back at Fluffy. “Oh, no, I didn’t know——” she began.

“Of course she didn’t know,” cut in a black domino. “Do you think we ask the advice of freshmen——”

“Straight Dutton,” cried Fluffy indignantly, “what are you doing helping a lot of juniors? You belong with us.”

The black domino, thus reproached, shrugged her shoulders defiantly. “You spoiled my nap and made me mad.” Then she laughed. “You won’t be a bit mad after we’ve finished with you. Truly you won’t. We’ve got lovely stunts and the weirdest eats. Forward march, captives,—and hurry, or we shan’t have time for everything.”

Enthroned on Timmy Wentworth’s writing table, with Eugenia Ford to coach her in the lines of her part, Montana Marie O’Toole acted as mistress of the Rescue ceremonies.

“Fluffy Dutton, turn your dress backside front and inside out and speak a piece.”

“Eugenia Ford, tell us the whole and complete story of the Winsted men you have flirted with since last week Wednesday.”

“Mary Mason, sing the Rosary without stopping to laugh.”

“Tilly Ann Leavitt, do your Chantecler stunt—all through.”

Montana Marie announced each “lovely stunt,” after Eugenia had whispered it to her, with much dignity. She watched its performance gaily, and greeted its climax with a gurgle of appreciative laughter.

When the sun—it was a big jack-o’-lantern, and it had been hastily sent for from Tilly Ann’s room, to make her Chantecler stunt complete—when the sun came up over Timmy Wentworth’s screen and sent long, streaming rays of orange ribbon over the room and the audience, Montana Marie O’Toole lay back gasping in Eugenia’s arms.

“I saw that play acted in French, in dear old Paree. Did Miss Leavitt see it there too? Did she make up that take-off herself? Oh, my, I feel so perfectly at home here now!” Montana Marie rocked back and forth in an ecstasy of mirth and satisfaction.

“The world is such a small place,” she added with much originality, and smiled impartially on all classes present.

Then they turned out the lights and had the “weird eats”—the largest raw oysters to be bought in Harding, dipped in very thick, very hot chocolate sauce. And then they had “real food,” namely: Cousin Kate’s cookies and pineapple ice. Eugenia had requisitioned the “real food” of Betty Wales, at Straight’s instigation.

“If we gallantly rescue her freshman, she certainly ought to do something nice for us,” Straight had declared. “Tell her that we prefer ice to ice-cream, because we—I—have recently had a headache, and I feel for ice. Tell her she will be an angel to send the things because we haven’t had a dessert that I like this whole long week.”

And Betty, who understood all about campus fare, smilingly promised, and was better than her word to the extent of a huge pitcher of lemonade.

Montana Marie was proving rather an amusing protégée, she reflected that evening, after Thomas, the new door and errand boy, had been dispatched to the Belden with the “real eats.” The girls liked her, in spite of her queerness, and so did the faculty; at least several of them had spoken of her to Betty in very friendly terms. College had been open nearly a month now, but Montana Marie had not asked for any help from her official tutor except with her entrance conditions. The one in history she was almost ready to pass off, Betty thought. She made a note on her engagement pad: “Ask M. M. how freshman work is going, specially math.” Betty smiled to herself, as she remembered how scared all the Chapin House crowd had been over their freshman math. And then in the end nobody had been even warned except Roberta, and that was because she was always too frightened that first year to try to recite; Roberta was labeled a “math. shark” before she graduated.

Betty wondered how the Rescue party was progressing. She wished she were not a “near-faculty,” with faculty dignity to sustain. She longed to borrow a black domino and a mask and join the Rescue party incognito. She thought of a deliciously funny “stunt” to suggest as Susanna Hart’s penalty for having instigated Montana Marie’s hazing party. She hoped her freshman would be game—would make them keep on liking her—now that they had begun.

She stayed late at the Tally-ho working on her accounts, and reached the campus just in time to run into Montana Marie O’Toole being escorted home,—at top speed, owing to the exigencies of the ten o’clock rule,—by Eugenia, the Dutton twins, reunited without loss of time, and Susanna Hart.

Straight detached herself from escort duty to tell Betty all about the party. “Part two, the Rescue, was a grand, extra-special success,” she explained, “and the sophs say that part one was just as good. I say, Betty, did you give us away? Did you tell Montana Marie about the Rescue?”

Betty hadn’t even seen her freshman for two days, until to-night’s brief encounter.

Straight considered. “I wonder if somebody else told her. She didn’t act a bit surprised. But then she never does act surprised, no matter what happens or what wild tales we stuff her with. Betty, have you noticed how you can’t ever tell what she thinks?”

Betty laughed. “I never can tell what people think, Straight, unless they tell me. It’s only Madeline and you clever twins who can read people’s minds.”

“Only some people’s,” Straight corrected modestly. “And I don’t believe even the wonderful Madeline could read Montana Marie’s. She’s queer. That’s the only word that describes her,—except pretty, of course,—just queer. First you laugh at her, then you like her, and before you get tired of her foolishness you get awfully interested in studying her out. And you can’t. Can’t make her out, I mean. Betty——” Straight paused at the door of Morton Hall.

“Yes,” laughed Betty.

“Ask her if she knew about to-night’s Rescue party, will you?”

“Of course,” Betty promised. “Fly now, Straight, or you’ll be locked out.”

“Never.” Straight prepared to fly her fastest. “I’ll bet you anything, Betty Wales, that you won’t ever find out. Whether she knew, I mean. Good-night, Betty.”

Straight had flown.

CHAPTER IV
MONTANA MARIE TAKES A RIDE

Georgia Ames had missed Montana Marie’s initiation party, having been engaged that evening in helping to console Mary Brooks Hinsdale for the temporary loss of her husband.

“Clever husbands are so intermittent,” Mary had sighed plaintively. “Now you have them to provide tea for, and other amusements, and now they’re off to the ends of the earth to deliver a lecture. And mine won’t ever take me along, because my frivolous aspect rattles him when he gets up to speak. I presume,” Mary smiled serenely, “that he also thinks said frivolous aspect would queer him with his learned friends; only he’s too polite to put it to me so baldly. And the moral of all this, Georgia, my child, is: Don’t marry a professor, unless you are prepared to take the consequences. The immediate consequence is that you’ve got to be Georgia-to-the-Rescue for me this time, and come up to spend Saturday night.”

“And so,” Georgia explained to Betty later, “I wasn’t on hand to be Georgia-to-the-Rescue for your freshman. But then she didn’t need me. She really didn’t even need rescuing. And just to show her how I admire her pluck, I’ve made the riding-party I’m going off with ask her to come on our Mountain Day trip.”

“But she can’t possibly get a horse so late in the day,” objected Betty.

“Belle Joyce has sprained her ankle and gone home, so somebody else can have the Imp.”

Betty looked anxious. “But, Georgia dear, you know the Imp is a pretty lively horse. Are you sure that Marie rides well enough to go off on him with your experienced crowd?”

“Oh, I guess so,” Georgia answered easily. “She’s ridden a lot out West, she says. She’s telegraphed to Montana for her own saddle and her riding things, and they ought to be here to-day. When they come, I’ll take her out on a practice trip to be sure that she can ride. Nobody wants to kill off your amusing freshman, Betty; so don’t look so awfully solemn.”

Betty laughed heartily. “Well, you know I had a nice spill here once myself, and so I believe in being careful. But I think it was ever so nice of you to include Marie in your party, Georgia.”

“There isn’t a freshman in college who wouldn’t give her best hat for the chance of going off with our crowd,” Georgia declared modestly. “It’s funny, isn’t it, Betty, how much the girls care about getting in with the right college set?”

Betty nodded. “And I’m afraid it’s not because the right college set, as you call it, generally has the most fun. It’s very often only because they are silly enough to want the name of being popular.”

“Snobs!” muttered Georgia scornfully. “Well, Montana Marie is no snob, and thanks mostly to you there aren’t nearly so many snobs in Harding as there were when I first came up.”

“Really? Do you notice a difference?” demanded Betty eagerly.

“Yes, and lots of it,” declared Georgia, “so don’t work too hard this year creating the proper college spirit, because you don’t need to. And don’t worry about our killing off your freshman. Unless I see that she’s a very good rider on our trial trip, I’ll make her swap off the Imp with one of the girls who can surely manage him, and take old Polly. Old Polly wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Montana Marie’s pet saddle and riding clothes did not come until just in time for Mountain Day, but Georgia took her, according to promise, for the practice ride, borrowing Straight Dutton’s skirt for her, and explaining that it was Harding custom not to bother about hats.

Montana Marie listened graciously to Georgia’s sage advice about being very careful until you knew your horse; and she made no objection to starting out on Polly, who was a meek-looking, gentle-gaited bay with one white foot,—the idol of timid beginners in Harding riding circles. But before they had gone a mile, Montana Marie drew rein and announced pleasantly that she couldn’t ride Polly a step further.

“I suppose I must be too heavy for her. She seems so tired, and she lags behind so. Would you be willing to change with me, Miss Ames? You are lighter, and you are used to Polly’s ways. You don’t blame me, do you, for hating to use up a horse?”

So Montana Marie rode Georgia’s favorite Captain, who single-footed by choice but would canter if crowded to it. He cantered with Montana Marie all the way to Far-away Glen, the destination of the party. There they dismounted to drink out of a mountain spring, and Montana Marie somehow settled it that the groom from the stables should go back on Polly, Captain being restored to Georgia, and the skittish roan named Gold Heels left for herself. Georgia protested anxiously, but Montana Marie smiled and reassured her.

“Why, you can’t worry about me, Miss Ames. I’ve ridden all my life,” she said, making the roan curvet and prance on purpose. “I guess I rode before I walked. But these pancake saddles are the limit, I think. Just you wait till my own outfit comes, and then I’ll show you some real riding. My, but it seems like old times to be on a horse! I had just one ride all the time we were in Paris. Riding in a park is too slow for me, and besides I hate side-saddles—you can’t use anything else over there, you know—as I hate—select schools for girls,” added Montana Marie in an unwonted burst of confidence.

“So you’re glad to be back in America?” asked Georgia idly.

“I should say I am, Miss Ames. Some day you’ll know, maybe, just how glad I am.”

Georgia was too busy keeping Captain from imitating the roan’s pernicious tactics in the matter of shying at dead leaves to wonder exactly what Montana Marie was driving at so earnestly.

“She will be perfectly safe on the Imp,” Georgia reported later to Betty. “At least I think so, and anyhow she is perfectly set on riding him, and she said she’d never ride old Polly again, if there wasn’t another horse in the world. So we shall just have to let her decide about the risks for herself. Your freshman has a mind of her own, hasn’t she, Betty?”

Betty agreed laughingly. Montana Marie, when approached by her official tutor about her freshman class work, particularly freshman math., had reported easily that she guessed everything was going all right.

“But anyway, I’m planning to get my entrance conditions off first,” she announced. “Then I can devote my whole time to regular work. I believe in being systematic, don’t you, Miss Wales?”

Betty tried to explain that the entrance conditions were regarded by the Powers as extras, not to take the place or time of regular work. Montana Marie listened good-naturedly.

“I never could do but one thing at once, Miss Wales,” she explained at last. “In Germany I forget every word I know of French, and in dear old Paree I actually almost forget my English. If I could only cut classes entirely for a week or so and get this entrance history and Latin prose off my mind!”

“Well, you can’t,” Betty told her decidedly. “Your having so many conditions will make all your teachers specially particular. The very least you can do, when President Wallace stretched a rule to let you in, is not to cut a single, single class, unless you are too ill to go, of course.”

Montana Marie sighed plaintively. “I never was ill in my life. I think I am doing fairly well in my studies, Miss Wales. I certainly try hard enough. After all the fuss I had about getting in, I don’t want to get out again yet a while. The great trouble is that there are so many social affairs all the time. When I’m looking forward to a dinner on the campus or a dance in the gym. or a walk with that cute little Miss Hart, why I just can’t settle down to study. It was lucky Miss Hart had an impromptu initiation for me. I shouldn’t have been able to learn a single lesson with an initiation to look forward to.”

“Then if it diverts your mind to go to things, you simply mustn’t go to so many, Marie.” Betty tried to look severe and to speak sternly. “You must refuse some of your invitations. Or else you must learn to concentrate your mind on whatever you’re doing, work as well as play. Being able to jump straight from Greek to the sophomore reception and from chemistry lab. into managing a basket-ball team is one of the most valuable things you can learn at this college. And you’ve got to learn it early in freshman year, or you won’t ever get comfortably through your mid-years.” Betty surveyed Montana Marie’s unruffled calm rather despairingly.

Montana Marie smiled comfortingly back at her tutor, and then sighed faintly. “I’m not sure, Miss Wales, that I have any mind to concentrate. You see in the convent your soul was the most important thing, and in Miss Mallon’s Select School for American Girls your manners and the pictures in the Louvre were the most important. But I promise you that I won’t go everywhere I’m asked—not anywhere until I’ve passed off my history. And I promise not to cut, and I’ll ask my teachers right away if my work is satisfactory.”

Betty wrote her mother that night that Marie was developing wonderfully, quite as Mrs. Wales had prophesied, and that taking charge of her was really no trouble at all, because she was so anxious to carry out her part of the bargain she had made with Betty, to do her best.

“So tell Will to tell Tom Benson,” Betty wrote, “that Miss O’Toole isn’t a handful. I’m almost afraid she’ll turn out a dig or a prig or something of that kind, she seems so anxious to do good work. But all the nicest girls like her, so I guess I needn’t worry about her not having a good time.”

The day before Mountain Day the history condition was removed from Miss Montana Marie O’Toole’s record of scholarship, and Betty congratulated her freshman warmly and went off to spend the holiday in Babe’s wonderful house on the Hudson feeling as care-free and irresponsible as if she were a freshman herself.

Georgia’s riding-party was to take horse—this knowing expression was also Georgia’s—at the Belden at nine o’clock sharp. At a quarter before the hour Montana Marie, the only off-campus member, arrived at the rendezvous. Her habit was brown corduroy, her hat a flapping sombrero, her lovely hair was coiled in a soft knot in her neck. It looked as if it would fall down before she had mounted, but not a lock was out of place that night, when Montana Marie rode the dripping, drooping Imp into his stable-yard half an hour ahead of the others, and sweetly asked the liveryman if he would mind giving her a real horse the next time she hired one.

“Because if you can’t, I guess I’ll ask my father to send one of his East to me,” she explained, reaching down to unbuckle her big saddle before she slipped easily out of it. “I don’t mean to compare this horse with old Polly or that silly roan,” she added politely. “But I do like a little real excitement when I go for a ride.”

If Montana Marie had found her Mountain Day tame, the rest of the party had not lacked for “real excitement” in generous measure. Montana Marie had ridden decorously enough between Georgia and Susanna Hart out of the town and up Sugar Hill to White Birch Lane. At the turn into the woods she had produced a magenta silk bandana and knotted it coquettishly at the back of her neck.

“Now I’m a real cow-girl,” she explained. “Ma can educate me all she wants, but she can’t educate the West out of me. She’d never have sent me this wild and woolly outfit. She’d have written her New York tailor to come right up here and fit me out. But I like these things best, so I just telegraphed to Dad, and he did as I said. He always does. Now why don’t we race up the next hill?” Montana Marie started off the Imp with a yodeling shout and a wildly waving arm that made even sedate old Polly take a keen interest in following. Susanna Hart’s horse reared, and Fluffy Dutton shrieked hysterically. Then the skittish roan Gold Heels bolted down a side-path with the groom from the stable, and before he could get back to his charges’ assistance, a Belden House sophomore, who was always unlucky with horses, carelessly fell off the Captain’s back. True to his training the big horse stopped dead in his tracks, and Montana Marie, having seen the accident over her shoulder, rushed the Imp back, dismounted, and assisted the unlucky sophomore to her feet with the sincerest apologies for having “made any one any trouble.”

“If you’d had a saddle like mine you wouldn’t have fallen off,” she ended regretfully. “You can’t enjoy a real wild ride on those little flat seats.”

“We’re not out for a wild ride,” Georgia rebuked her sternly. “If you want to race and make a general disturbance you must ride way ahead alone. But if I were you——”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think of stirring up anything more,” declared Montana Marie demurely, pulling the Imp into a decorous park-trot beside the unlucky sophomore, who was luckily not a bit the worse for her tumble. “I’m only a little freshman, and I want to learn the college ways in riding as in other things.” She secreted her magenta neckerchief again, and “rode like a perfect lady,” to quote from Georgia’s account of the matter, all the way to Top Notch Falls, and all the way back against the sunset, until——

Little Eugenia Ford’s horrified description of what happened next was perhaps the most vivid of those furnished to eager inquirers.

“When we were down on the meadow-road,” Eugenia began that evening to an attentive audience of her house-mates, “it got a little bit dusky. We heard some horses coming fast behind us, and it was my Cousin John Ford, who is a senior at Winsted, and three men from his frat-house. They stopped to speak to me, and I introduced them to Fluffy and Montana Marie, who were riding beside me. We happened to be quite a little ahead of the others. John said something about Montana Marie’s queer Mexican saddle, and that freshman put on her awful magenta handkerchief again, and asked him if he liked cow-girls and ‘real exciting’ rides, and of course John said yes. And she said to come on then, and hit his horse with her whip, and they just tore off in the dark.” Eugenia’s big brown eyes were round with horror. “John is a splendid rider or he wouldn’t have stayed on, because his horse—it’s one of his own and a thoroughbred—had never been touched with a whip before, and it nearly went crazy when Montana Marie whacked it. So his horse flew and the Imp flew too, and John tried to stop, but she just shouted again and again, and egged both the horses on. John telephoned me as soon as I got home, to say that his neck wasn’t broken, and to inquire for hers. He seemed to think it was a joke, but for my part”—Eugenia looked as severe as so small and so pretty a young lady was able to look—“for my part I think it was unladylike and dangerous, and I hope Georgia will never want to ask her to go riding with us again. My horse almost ran too.” Eugenia grew a shade more haughty. “She asked John to call and to bring his three friends. I—I’m afraid he’ll come.”

“I shouldn’t be much surprised if he did,” agreed a caustic senior, who roomed next door. “Montana Marie O’Toole is not exactly a lady, and she—well, I don’t know that she is ever exactly inconsiderate except on horseback. But she’s always interesting, foot or horseback. Were your crowd—were you thinking of dropping her because she messed up your ride?”

Eugenia flushed. “She’s asked the Mountain Day party to dinner to-morrow night at the Vincent Arms. She boards there, you know. She seems to be—very rich. I don’t know much about her family, but Betty Wales has met her mother and liked her. I—I do want to see the inside of that wonderful boarding-house.”

“Millionairesses’ Hall, isn’t it called?” asked the senior. “Yes, I’ve wanted to go there too, for dinner, but I don’t know anybody who’ll ask me. They have flowers on the tables every night, and seven courses. You’d better go.”

Eugenia considered. “It would be fun. Only—she was really horrid—racing off that way with John.”

“Maybe he won’t call on her, after all,” consoled the senior. “If he does—eat her dinner first, drop her afterward. But whether you drop her or not, she’s bound to stay in fashion here. She’s interesting, lady or no lady. Don’t go riding with her, if you don’t like her Western style. But for my part, I think she’s really too good to miss. Now isn’t it just like that lucky Betty Wales to have the most entertaining freshman, as well as the most fascinating tea-room, to amuse herself with?”

At the very moment when the caustic senior was making this remark, Betty Wales sat at her desk in the fascinating tea-shop. The entertaining freshman sat beside her. For once she was not smiling. Spread out on the desk before Betty were three distinct and separate warnings, in freshman math., freshman Latin, and freshman lit., respectively. Betty Wales had seen a few warnings before, but she did not remember any that were quite so frank and unqualified in their condemnation of the recipient’s scholastic efforts and attainments as the three euphemistically addressed to Miss M. M. O’Toole.

CHAPTER V
THE B. C. A.’S “UNDERTAKE” MONTANA MARIE

Madeline Ayres had come up to Harding to celebrate the acceptance of a novel by her favorite firm of publishers. Babbie Hildreth had come too, to help Madeline celebrate, and also to talk to Mr. Thayer about that most important topic, the date of “the” wedding. And so of course the “B. C. A.’s” had appointed a special tea-drinking, to celebrate the acceptance of the novel, the visits of Madeline and Babbie, the prospect of a wedding in their midst, and the general joys involved in the state of being “Back at the College Again,”—which is what B. C. A. stood for. Equally of course the tea-drinking was to be held at the Tally-ho.

But when the hour of the grand celebration arrived, a damper was put on everything; Betty Wales had sent a hastily scribbled note, by an accommodating freshman who was going right past the Tally-ho, to say that she was too busy to come.

“She’s losing her sporting spirit,” declared Madeline sadly. “In days gone by you could depend on Betty’s turning up for any old lark. She might be late, if she happened to be pretty busy, but she always got there in the end.”

“And I wanted to ask her about wedding dates,” wailed Babbie plaintively. “I can’t have my wedding when Betty can’t come. She’s almost as important as the groom.”

“Betty is awfully important to such a lot of people,” complained Mary Brooks Hinsdale, who was looking particularly fascinating in her new fall suit, the christening of which had added an extra spice of interest to the grand tea-drinking. “She is altogether too capable for her own good. If she were only as lazy, or as unreliable, or as devoid of ideas and energy, as most of those here present, she wouldn’t find it so hard to escape for tea-drinkings and other pleasant festivities. Which one of her dependents has her in its clutches this afternoon, I wonder?”

Babbie, to whom Betty’s note had been addressed, consulted it for further details. “She says she’s got to tutor a freshman,” Babbie explained after a minute. “I suppose she is helping along some one who can’t afford to pay for regular lessons. Seems to me there ought to be girls enough in college to do that sort of thing without putting it off on Betty. Betty is too valuable to be wasted on mere tutoring.”

“Poor girls ought not to need to be tutored,” announced Madeline, in her oracular manner. “Unless they are bright and shining lights in their studies, they ought not to try to go through college at all.”

“But Madeline——” chorused the permanent B. C. A.’s—the ones who were always on hand in Harding, because they were either faculty or faculty wives. “But Babbie—you two don’t understand. Haven’t you heard about Betty’s freshman?”

“No, we haven’t,” chorused the new arrivals. “Tell us this minute.”

Mary finally got the floor. “My children,” she began in her most patronizing style, “our precious Betty Wales is not engaged in assisting some needy under classman along the royal road to learning, as you seem to suppose. She is acting as special tutor to the only daughter of a Montana mining magnate. Named Montana Marie after the mine, pretty as a picture, clever at horseback riding but not at mathematics,—and the grand sensation of Harding College just at present,” ended Mary proudly. Then the permanents told the “properly excited” newcomers the whole story of Montana Marie O’Toole.

“She sounds extremely interesting,” said Madeline reflectively, when they had finished.

“Almost like a ready-made heroine,” suggested Mary, winking knowingly at the others.

Madeline nodded absently, and everybody laughed at what Mary called the egotism of the literary instinct.

“Why, haven’t you ever caught Madeline squinting at you to see if you’ll do for a book?” demanded Mary, elaborating her point. “She relates everything, even friends, to her Literary Career. I wore my new suit to-day in the frantic hope that she’d like my looks well enough to put me into a play. I should simply adore seeing myself in a play,” sighed Mary.

“Well, you never will,” Madeline assured her blandly. “Not while you call me ‘my child,’ and patronize me instead of my tea-shop.”

Mary listened, wearing her beamish smile. “Egotism of the literary instinct again—she makes a personal matter out of everything. Now, if you’ve quite finished explaining your methods of literary work, suppose we return to the business of the meeting, which is——”

“Which seems to be your frivolous methods of securing the attention of the wise and great by wearing new clothes,” cut in Madeline promptly. “A very interesting subject, too, isn’t it, my children?”

Mary faced the challenger coldly. “The real business of the meeting,” she announced, “is the rescue of Betty Wales from the clutches of her too-numerous jobs, charities, helpful ideas, and noble ambitions, including that interesting but heavily conditioned freshman, Montana Marie O’Toole.”

“But I thought Georgia had been regularly ‘elected’ to look out for Betty,” suggested Christy Mason.

“Well, Georgia is only one,” explained Helen Chase Adams seriously, “and being a prominent senior keeps her fairly busy, I imagine. And then Betty doesn’t want to be rescued. It’s very hard to look out for a person that doesn’t want you to look out for him—her,” amended Helen hastily, with a vivid blush that instantly created another digression among the B. C. A.’s.

“I thought you didn’t like men, Helen Chase.”

“Who is he? Who is your protégé who objects to being looked after, Helen?”

“When you said ‘him’ you were only trying to speak good English? Well, isn’t ‘her’ as good English as ‘him’?”

“You might as well own up to him right off and save yourself a lot of trouble. Detective Ayres will shadow you till you confess.”

But Helen displayed a hitherto unsuspected talent for clever sparring. “It’s just like you girls to make a lot out of a little,” she declared, so earnestly that everybody saw she meant it. “That’s why we have such good times,—because you make all the stupid little things in life seem interesting.”

“Well, don’t dare to deny that you’re a stupid little thing,” Mary told her, with an appreciative pat to emphasize that she was only joking. “And please be duly thankful that we can make even you seem interesting.”

“Oh, I am grateful,” Helen told her, with pretty seriousness. “But you ought to keep within the probabilities, and you ought to have more variety about your inventions. We’ve got romances enough on hand, without making up one for me.”

“The business of this meeting——” began Mary again at last, pounding hard on the table with one of the fascinating fat mustard jars which Madeline had summarily bought in London to start the Tally-ho Tea-Shop. “The business of this meeting——”

“Is just coming in at the door,” Rachel Morrison laughingly finished Mary’s sentence for her.

And sure enough, Betty Wales, looking very young, very pretty, also very care-free and happy for a person in dire need of rescue, was shutting the door with one hand, giving Emily Davis a handful of letters and memoranda with the other, and telling Nora about a special dinner order for that evening as she slipped off her ulster. Then she made a bee-line for Jack o’ Hearts’ stall and the Merry Hearts.

“Let me in—way in, please,” she begged, scrambling past Babbie, Helen, and Mary to the most secluded seat at the back of the stall. “I came after all, because I wanted some fun, and I won’t be dragged out to talk to anybody about dinners they want me to plan, or Student’s Aid things, or Morton Hall things—or even a conditioned freshman,” she concluded with a particularly vindictive emphasis on the last phrase.

“Hear! Hear!” cried Christy Mason.