So one day when all the rest were talking Hampton, Hampton, and nothing but Hampton, and when Daphne Damon turned abruptly to Peggy and said: “Peg, infant, what are you going to do next year?” she answered quickly, “Clerk in a store, I think.” And their expressions were mingled astonishment and—yes, she caught it, envy.
“My goodness, Peggy, wouldn’t that be lovely,” gasped Florence Thomas. “Who would ever think of anything so daring but you? You’ll certainly have more to write about in your letters than we will, but will you promise to keep up a correspondence with us, nevertheless, so we can hear how the famous experiment is going?”
Peggy only laughed.
A while later, in their room, Katherine excitedly handed Peggy a letter she had just been reading.
“From your substitute, Peggy,” she said, “or, in other words, my room-mate-to-be. The registrar gave her my address, just as she had given me hers, and she was sweet enough to write me a let’s-get-acquainted letter. I never thought of doing it. She has a nice name, hasn’t she—Gloria Hazeltine.”
Mechanically Peggy took the note and read it slowly:
“My dear Miss Foster Who is to be My Room-mate”: it began, “Or hadn’t I better begin right away by saying Katherine, and then we won’t feel so strange when we talk to each other really for the first time—”
Peggy looked wistfully up from the letter to her room-mate’s glowing face.
“I won’t tell you any of my faults,” she read on, “because you’ll have a year to find those out, and I think for those things, a year is long enough. The main purpose of this letter is to so mislead you that you will think I haven’t any faults and then, when you finally see me, it will take such a long time for readjustment that, before you’ve really found me out, I shall have made you like me a little for good and keeps. I’ve never had a room-mate myself, and I hope you haven’t, so that it will be equally new to both of us to have to consider someone else’s taste and wishes at every turn. What color do you like best? I am beginning to plan my things, and we might as well get together on a color scheme so that our couch covers won’t be too jarringly different, and my flamboyant cushions won’t be shamed by some mouse-like ones of yours, and vice-versa.
“I am looking forward to rooming with you because I have you all planned out in my mind. I sit and think slowly ‘Katherine Foster’ just like that, and then you rise before me. Only perhaps it isn’t you at all. But I promise not to be disappointed in you whatever you are like, and won’t you write back and make me the same promise?