“I’m going home to-night. I was foolish to plan to stay over, but a senior I know asked me to, and I thought of course she meant it. And she only let me entertain her youngest brother part of one morning, and made me give her my ticket to the senior play.”
“What a shame!” Betty sympathized.
“But I was to blame. I was a goose,” Eugenia repeated. “I ought to have known that she only wanted to get something out of me. If I rush up to people all of a sudden, when I’ve never noticed them much before, I generally want to get something out of them. It’s naturally the same with other girls.”
Betty laughed. “Better stick to the ones who are always nice to you—your real friends,” she advised.
“But then you won’t get on,” objected Eugenia wisely. “They say you’ve got to scheme a lot to be in things here. You’ve got to make yourself known.”
“Why not just try to be worth knowing?” Betty suggested. “My friend Rachel Morrison was as quiet and—and—unpushing as could be, but she was so bright and nice and thoughtful for other people and so reliable that everybody wanted her for a friend.”
Eugenia sighed. “I’m not bright or thoughtful for others. I—oh, dear, this isn’t what I came to talk about, Miss Wales. I—I stopped to say good-bye to Dorothy. I—she—we made up. I mean—we hadn’t exactly quarreled, so we couldn’t exactly make up. But I felt so ashamed. Being mean to little girls makes you feel so ashamed—even if they don’t know about it. Miss Wales, I’ve heard about the dormitory for poor girls—Morton Hall. When I went home in the spring my father said that as far as he could see you’d taught me about all the sensible things I’d learned this year. He asked me what you’d like for a present. I couldn’t decide, but when I heard about the dormitory I wrote and asked him to send you a check for extra things, you know, for the furnishings, or to pay part of some girl’s board. I thought perhaps you’d rather have that—from us—than something for yourself.” She put three checks into Betty’s hand. “Two of my best friends sent the others. It was what they had left from their spring term allowances. Susanna would like hers to go for a picture in the house parlor. Molly doesn’t care.”
Eugenia rushed through all this information so fast that Betty had no chance to interrupt, and at the end she was speechless with surprise. She glanced at the checks. The smallest was for a hundred dollars. Together they would provide endless “extras” for Morton Hall, or help dozens of poor girls to make both ends meet.
“Oh, Eugenia, you are a dear,” she cried impulsively. “And your father is a dear too, and these other girls. But why not give it right to the college yourselves?”
“Because you’ll think of something nicer than they would to do with it. Anyway it’s a sort of a present to you—father’s part. You’re just to say it’s from friends of yours. We don’t want our names mentioned. You’re the one who put the idea into my head. We’re not doing it for anything but to please you, and Susanna and Molly because they liked the idea, and what was the use keeping over their allowances?”