“And nothing but my own determination to go on,—no reason to think I have any particular talent or ability—she has already taken away all that notion. Just the will to do it whether I can or not—to show her that I can.”
“Yes,” agreed Katherine once more, “that’s all you’d have to go on. I think you are good at writing, but then I think you can do anything. I can’t write myself, so my opinion really isn’t so very valuable. You’d have to do it without encouragement.”
“I want her respect, Katherine; I want to have her think in the end that I’m the best writer that ever took Thirteen, but—it would mean giving most of my time and all my energies to my English—and I might not turn out any good in the end.”
“True,” Katherine again attacked her room-mate’s problem, “and if you never touch pen to paper again” (the phrase had them both) “you can soon forget this hurt to-day and you need not put yourself in a similar position again, and your main work can go to—well, to math or anything else.”
Peggy paced up and down the room and Katherine, never doubting but that this was the most serious problem that had ever been fought out in college, followed her room-mate’s figure with eyes that brimmed with sympathy and a heartful of affectionate loyalty that longed to be of help and could not.
“Say, Peggy,” she said suddenly, “I want to take a note over to the note-room for one of the girls in my Latin class. Don’t you want to come along? This doesn’t have to be decided all at once, does it?”
Peggy silently slipped on her sweater again and the girls ran across the campus to the big recitation hall and thence down the basement steps to the note-room. Crowds of girls were swarming into and out of this place where, on little boards—one to each class—the girls left their communications for each other under the proper initials. In so large a college it was necessary to have some easy and direct means of reaching each other without delay or the expense of telephone or postage. Every girl went to the note-room once every day—and a particularly popular one ran down after each class to gather in the sheaves of invitations, business notes, and club meeting announcements that were sure to be hers.
Peggy and Katherine squeezed through the crowds, greeting many other freshmen as they were suddenly brought face to face, and at length they stood before the freshman bulletin and Katherine stuck her note in the rack at the letter R, while Peggy glanced, from habit, back to her own initial. There were many little important-looking notes stuck upright over the letter P, and Peggy fingered them over listlessly. Delia Porter, Helen Pearson, Margaret Perry and so on, until all at once from the most inviting looking of all leaped her own name, Peggy Parsons, in perfectly unfamiliar writing—writing almost too assured to be that of a freshman at all.
Wonderingly she unfolded the little square, and then, jammed in by the other girls as she was, she flung her arms around Katherine’s neck and cried out with a sob of joy, “Oh, kiss me, Katherine!—they want my poem for the Monthly!”
From dull gray the world leaped to glowing radiance. For a freshman to be invited to give a poem to the Monthly! Her great problem was solved automatically, and Peggy would be an author from that time forth until she should be graduated.