The patter of running feet interrupted her and a group of girls burst upon them.
“We saw what happened from up the shore,” one gasped. “Are you all right, Dean Travis?”
Dean Travis! Gale felt the world whirling around her. This was the new Dean!
“I am quite all right, thank you,” the Dean was saying composedly.
A second later she was gone and the other girls with her. Gale was alone and she sank down dejectedly on a tree trunk. For a long time she sat there staring out over the water. Finally she made her way slowly back to the sorority house where Phyllis was waiting for her.
That afternoon Gale went to the office of the Dean. If she had been nervous this morning before she met the Dean she was ten times more so now. To think of the things she had said! They made her cheeks burn now. How could she have talked so and to the Dean! She sat on the hard outer office chair and thought of all the places she would rather be. She thought of Phyllis and Madge and Valerie swimming in the lake. She thought of Janet and Carol again playing tennis. How she longed to be with them. How she longed to be anywhere where she did not have to face the Dean!
“You may go in, Miss Howard,” the secretary said.
Gale stood up and took a deep breath. She covered the distance into the office in little less than a run. She felt she had to go as quickly as possible before she turned and fled out of sheer panic.
There was another woman with Dean Travis, a woman with brown curly hair and a flashing, whimsical smile, absurdly young to be the school physician, but such Gale found her to be when they were introduced. She stayed to talk with Gale and the Dean for several minutes and the Freshman felt all her self-consciousness and timidity melting away before the warmth of the Doctor’s smile. However, when the Doctor had gone and the Dean was seated behind her desk, Gale in the chair before her, the girl felt her discomfiture returning. After all, this woman was the Dean and she had talked to her and treated her much as she might have Phyllis or Valerie. Hereafter she must remember to treat the Dean with the respect and deference required by the head of the girls’ college.