They felt as if all previous experiences were washed away—and all future ones unknown and unguessed at. Everything was before them—the glory of being young singing in their hearts and going to their heads like wine—what wonder that they felt life had been made just for them and was already beginning to yield its fruits into their eager hands!
The cab went grating up a hill, and in a moment there was a bright stretch of green before them, with any number of red brick buildings on it, some of them covered with ivy. Hampton College was spread before their gaze without any warning to prepare them. But each girl knew, as if she had seen it often, that this was really College.
Katherine and Peggy craned their necks quite frankly out of the window, and when they drew their heads in, the other girls followed their example shamelessly.
“It looks—nice,” ventured Peggy, with a long sigh of satisfaction.
“It looks just—the way I thought it would,” answered one of the strangers, and then gave a little embarrassed laugh because her voice had sounded so thrilled.
The taxi made a sharp turn, and they were actually inside the sacred precincts of Campus—there on each side were the rows of college houses, and in the distance was a magnificent structure of stone. The morning sun shone over it all. A sense of homelikeness and a strange comfortable feeling of love for it came, even at this first view, into their hearts.
“We are to live in one of these houses,” Peggy rapturously reminded Katherine. “In a moment the taxi will stop and it will be our house. Katherine, pinch my arm. It all seems so queerly familiar, maybe I’m just dreaming it after all.”
But the taxi did stop in a minute or two, and the driver was opening the door and saying “Ambler House” in a matter-of-fact tone. The two other girls nodded good-bye to Peggy and Katherine. Katherine stepped down and was handed her bag. Peggy was conscious that the long porch of the brick house before which they had drawn up was filled with girls interestedly watching for freshman newcomers. She thought of their plan to make a good initial impression, and descended as gracefully as might be, with a charming little smile of eagerness and anticipation that was not assumed at all.
The driver was lifting down her heavy suit-case. And then quite unexpectedly came the fall that follows pride. Only, while the pride had been Peggy’s, the fall was her suit-case’s.
Thump! Thud! it went smashing down to the ground, and its bulging sides flew apart, and hair-brushes, mirrors, nightgown, kimono, and powder boxes and tooth paste all shot out in every direction and rolled ignominiously about on the campus lawn, in full view of the crowded porch of Ambler House.