Katherine’s forehead was wrinkled. “You know that old green denim curtain that hangs before the clothes closet in our bedroom, Peggy? Don’t you suppose that would be better than nothing? It was there when we came, but it isn’t so very ancient looking, and it would be inconspicuous anyway—and just about the kind of thing you see in lots of rooms.”
With ruthless hands they tore down the big green curtain in their own suite, snipped off the rough end with scissors, and bore it back in triumph to Cinderella’s apartment.
“I’m going to run over to Gloria’s,” said Peggy then, “and ask her to part with one or two of those pictures she got for being elected. She has two Home-keeping Hearts that I know of, and several pictures that look like photographs that can’t mean much to her, and would just cheer up our protegee wonderfully, and make her room pass muster with any guest.”
Peggy’s tireless feet carried her blithely across the campus to Gloria’s room, and it didn’t take her twenty minutes to pick out what she wanted, with Gloria’s help.
“Of course I’m glad to have your little friend have them,” said the obliging freshman president. “And if you want me to, I’ll come over and see her some time and bring a lot of girls from my house—junior celebrities and senior dramatists and people like that, and it might have a good effect on those Amblerites that tried to snub her.”
“It looks like a different place,” Peggy and Katherine congratulated themselves later when they had done what they could in the way of changes. “It’s changed from a poor little apology of just a place to sleep, into an inviting and cozy college room—with the brightest cushions a person could imagine,” they summed up boastfully.
Lilian came dragging home from classes, tired circles under her eyes after the strain of the evening before, and a return of hopelessness toward her situation. She had Peggy and Katherine for her friends, but after all these two joyous freshmen went very much their own way, and were too busy with engagements with more important people, to think of her much—the girl with the horrid clothes and the wadded-up hair—and the unattractive room. So she reasoned disconsolately.
She opened her own door listlessly and entered the room.
And then she thought that she had made a mistake. It couldn’t be her room—of course it wasn’t—and yet, when she turned in bewilderment to leave it she beheld her own books on the rickety little table.
Well, it was magic! However it had happened, she accepted it with a queer choking sense that she was really to live in a room like other rooms hereafter. College had suddenly come close.