Janet's college career

by Amy Ella Blanchard

"I'll never see my Annie any more," chanted Lee. "Do stop all this sentimentality, Janet. I shall keep all my regrets and bewailings till I leave college for good. We can't wait while you gather all your tears in a bottle, and if you are going to stand there all day and apostrophize that old tassel, we will not wait for you."

Janet came back to solid facts, and they all crowded out into the corridor and down the stairs, chattering, laughing, whispering, singing, out into the summer sunshine and across the campus, their class flag floating before them. At the chapel door they gathered in a body to give their class yell, and then they filed in.

It made Janet feel cold "all down her spine," she told Teddy afterward, when she saw the sophomores ranged each side the entrance, lifting their caps and forming an arch under which the seniors walked. It was like some triumphal procession of which she was part and parcel. She belonged to Class Day. All those exercises, of which she had so often read, were being carried out because she and others like her made up a grand whole without which there could be no college. She looked around at the sea of faces, and for the first time in her life felt the seriousness of the thought that each individual is responsible for its class, whether it be at college or elsewhere. Then came the opening prayer, and she entered, heart and soul, into the day's proceedings.

Commencement Day was less impressive to her, for her one great interest lay in the act of changing the place of the college cap so that its position would mean that the wearer had taken a step upward, and that henceforth Janet Ferguson would no longer be known as a freshman.

The next excitement was the packing, and the departure for home. Becky Burdett she would see again at frat meetings and elsewhere, but Nell Deford would step out into the past and become a memory. Janet's lips trembled as she kissed Nell good-bye, and more than one girl wept over her. Then came other partings, gay ones, and those full of the promise of meeting in a few months. Edna was to spend part of her summer at Janet's home, and Rosalie exacted a few days from them both before they should settle down in their rooms in the fall.

Of the rest, some traveled southward part of the way with Janet, and others stood upon the platform to see them off, their college yell being the last sound that was drowned by the shriek of the locomotive. So Janet traveled on; and as the scenes grew more and more familiar, her thoughts and desires were all flying ahead of her, to meet her as facts on the threshold of the home she had left nearly nine months before.

[CHAPTER VI]

IN THE GYM

MOST of the sophomore class had gathered in the gymnasium one afternoon not long after Janet had returned to college. Nearly all of the former students had come back, the only ones who had dropped out being Addie Cox and Kathie Steele.

Janet was squirming through a series of square openings, Edna was exercising upon the horizontal bar, while Lee Penrose was lightly vaulting over the "horse." The enthusiasm of the girls was always noticeable when the year was new, for not only did they enjoy revisiting their old haunts, but most of them found it not unpleasant, in their early pride of being sophomores, to display to the freshmen their familiarity with the various institutions of the college.