Peggy’s crimson ears caught shrieks of laughter, her tear-filled eyes saw girlish figures doubling up in mirth—and under her feet and round about, the ground was white with powder, redolent with oozing perfume and strewn with her most intimate belongings.
There was something about it all that had the awful publicity of a nightmare. Such things couldn’t really happen. Oh, if she could only melt away—or wake up or even crawl back into the taxi and hide.
“Shall I help you pick the things up?”
“I’m afraid this powder can never be scraped up again. I’ve put some back into the box, but there’s quite a bit of grass and gravel mixed with it.”
She was completely surrounded by helpful girls, who had flown out from the porch, their laughter still on their lips, and were now kneeling and stooping everywhere about the scene of the catastrophe.
“Your clean shirtwaist,” cried one of these helpers sympathetically, as she pulled a fragile bit of dimity and Cluny lace from under the taxi-cab where it had fluttered. “It won’t be good for very much now until it’s laundered.”
Into the suit-case the things were tumbled with despatch but not neatness. The taxi driver was contrite, but he did not offer to touch any of the scattered feminine luggage and insisted quite audibly that there had been “too many things in there anyway.”
Katherine paid him, eying him reproachfully, and he chugged away, leaving the two heart-broken freshmen greatly discomfited by the mishap.
Thus it was that the two girls who had hoped to make so attractive an impression slunk into Ambler House with a straggling procession of merry followers behind them carrying odds and ends that refused to be crammed back into the damaged suit-case. And thus it came about also that they looked about Suite 22 with blind eyes and failed to realize that it was one of “the grandest suites on Campus” and overlooked Paradise.
Peggy sat down in a little heap on the window seat in their living-room and didn’t even appreciate that it was a window seat, and one of very, very few at college.