“K. Kittredge is as comical as ever. Ask her about her prize English pupil.”
“Do you know, you’re glad to see everybody these days. Why, Jean Eastman rushed up to me, and I fell upon her neck. Digs and freaks and snobs and all, they belong to 19— and the good old days.”
“Do you feel that way too? I wondered if any one else had noticed the horrid little changes. I suppose things will change, but I wish——”
“Nonsense! Look at this tea-shop. It’s a change all right, and for my part I don’t see how we should live without it.”
“Oh, but this is different. This is 19—’s very own.”
“Where’s Betty Wales, anyway? She’s so busy you can’t get within a mile of her.”
Thus 19—, over its ices in the Peter Pan Annex. The Tally-ho Tea-Shop was 19—’s headquarters, official and unofficial. There they breakfasted, lunched, tea-ed, and dined; there held informal “sings” and rallies, and there on the last evening of the festal week they were to eat their class supper. The tenth year class were to eat theirs in the loft. The fifteeners had engaged the first floor of the Peter Pan Annex, and the six graduates of the very oldest class were to lunch up in the top floor, among the tree-tops. No wonder that Betty was busy and had to be caught on the wing and forcibly detained by 19— friends. Commencement guests fairly beset the Tally-ho at meal-times. Between meals old girls and belated undergraduates thronged the tables. Betty could hardly believe her eyes when she counted up one day’s returns from the Peter Pan Annex. As for ploshkins, the first order had sold out almost before it was unpacked, and every class in college had wanted to adopt the ploshkin for its class animal. But Betty explained that 19— had already secured it.
Madeline had had that happy thought, of course, and Kate Denise, who was chairman of the supper committee, had capped it by ordering miniature ploshkins for favors and a mammoth one for a centerpiece. Then Madeline had written a ploshkin song which was so much cleverer than “The Bay Where the Ploshkin Bides,” that the Glee Club groaned with envy. There was also a 19— song called “Tea-Shop,” and one called “The House of Peter Pan,” so that Betty’s enterprises were much in the public eye, if she was not.
It was dreadfully hard to stick to work, when you knew that 19— was having a “Stunt-doers’ Meet” under the apple-trees on the back campus, or Dramatic Club’s Alumnæ tea, also with “stunts,” was on in the Students’ Building. The only consolation lay in the fact that your dearest friends calmly cut these surpassing attractions, to which some of them had traveled thousands of miles, just to sit by the cashier’s desk in the Tally-ho Tea-Shop, and talk to the cashier in her intervals of comparative leisure, waiting patiently while she made change, found tables for helpless or hurried customers, took “rush orders” to the kitchen when the waitresses were all too busy, and in general made things “go” in the steady, plodding, systematic fashion that her gay little soul loathed. But she realized that she had made a success of the Tally-ho just by keeping at it, and she was going home next week with little Dorothy and “money in her pocket,” in Will’s slangy phraseology, leaving Emily to take charge of the improvements which Madeline and Mr. Morton had planned on a scale of elegance that fairly took away Betty’s breath, and of the remnants of business that would be left when the hungry Harding girls had departed, and sleepy silence reigned on the deserted campus.
Eugenia Ford came in one afternoon early in commencement week, looking very meek and unhappy.