With arms around each other’s shoulders, the room-mates strolled back across the campus toward Ambler House. The sunlight shone over the campus and over the moving army of girls going in every direction across it, for it was just at the end of recitation hour. None of them wore hats, so that the light gleamed down on their hair. Most of them wore white sweaters or sport coats, and under the arm of each was tucked a notebook or a stack of study volumes.
All of them walked in pairs, as Katherine and Peggy were doing, or in laughing groups that gathered numbers as they went on.
Peggy and Katherine began to have an intimate sense of belonging to it all. Hampton was becoming their college in a way it had not been before. This campus and those red brick buildings, those laughing crowds of girls, their hair blowing in the wind—these things were to represent their whole world for four years, and, tightening their hands on each other’s shoulders, they were glad it was to be so.
And Peggy held crushed in her free hand a tiny wad of paper, the tangible evidence that this first year promised success to her.
[CHAPTER IV—NEW PAINT AND POETRY]
A summons to visit an invitation house!
And on such a gratifying mission! Peggy smiled as she slipped into her rose-colored taffeta, and Katherine, watching her with pride, decided that “the poet’s look” had come back.
“Well, good luck, room-mate,” she called as Peggy went out the door, and she received one radiant glance in answer from the departing young bard.
The pleasantly warm tone of the rose-colored taffeta buoyed up the new genius’ spirit all across the campus until she came out into Green Street and beheld the imposing reality of Macefield House directly before her.
She had the fleeting and snobbish wish that all the girls of her class could see her turning thus assuredly up the walk to the famous senior house. To be sure, she couldn’t help casting a cold look of disapproval at the porch—it was the messiest porch she had seen anywhere in Hampton, but she supposed the celebrity inhabitants of Macefield were all too busy with their dinners and dances and social duties generally to notice how careless and extremely—impromptu—the approach to their home appeared.