“Oh, oh,” she cried, “I wish more than ever that you were my room-mate! Which is Peggy Parsons that has taken you away from me?”
Peggy at once saw the other’s mistake and flushed. “I’m the guilty party,” she admitted. “I’m Peggy. But I want you please to like me a little—anyway. And now——” suddenly changing to a business-like tone of hospitality, “sit right down and have some tea. Girls, this is Morning Glory, Katherine’s and my best friend. You don’t mind my calling you that?” she inquired anxiously. “That’s the way Katherine and I spoke of you to ourselves and you—your looks bear it out so well,” she faltered.
Gloria, very much taken into the Ambler House set, and already being plied with tea and wonderful beaten biscuit, didn’t mind anything, and in a few minutes the whole room seemed to glow with a pervading happiness and content that took no account of the gloomy weather outside, and for this season at least the bugaboo ghost of the Freshman Rains was laid.
[CHAPTER III—PEGGY’S MASTERPIECE]
Peggy was bending absorbedly over her desk one evening biting her pen and then writing a bit and now and then crossing out part of what she had written, all with a kind of seraphic smile that puzzled Katherine more and more until she finally just had to speak about it.
“What are you doing, room-mate?” she demanded; “that look is so—so awfully unlike your usual expression.”
“Hush,” said Peggy, glancing up and waving her pen solemnly toward the other. “It’s a poet’s look.”
“A——? Peggy Parsons, you’re rooming with me under false pretenses. If you’re going to turn into a genius I’m going home. You know I perfectly hate geniuses and there are so many funny ones around college. I always thought that at least you——” her tone was scathing and beseeching at the same time, “at least you were immune.”
“Maybe I am,” said Peggy speculatively. “What is it?”
“What’s what?”