After the first fortnight things began to settle themselves into a more businesslike routine. The girls Betty knew, having recklessly indulged themselves during the tea-shop’s first week, were obliged to be content with campus fare for a while. One noon she realized with a little start of amazement that there wasn’t a girl that she knew in the room. Some of them doubtless knew her. Most of them had probably heard that she was a Harding girl, who was suddenly obliged to earn her living. Well, wasn’t she? And hadn’t she wanted to go into a really and truly business, and been almost sorry that in Harding everything was too much fun to seem like real work?
“We’ve been waiting a perfect age,” announced somebody over her shoulder. “Will you send a waitress, please, right away? You ought to give good service, you know, when you’re just starting in.”
The speaker was a tall, overdressed girl, with a scowl and a mouth that drooped at the corners. Betty remembered distinctly having seen her come in only a minute before. But she said, “I’m sorry,” and took the order out to the kitchen herself.
When Bridget had served it in a hurry, Betty heard the tall girl laugh disagreeably. “Wasn’t that neat?” she demanded of her companion. “I can always get what I want. Maybe she did see us come in; she couldn’t say so. That’s the way to treat tradespeople, even if they have been to college.”
That very afternoon, while the tall girl’s speech still rankled in Betty’s memory, recalling other petty slights and snubs, Miss Eugenia Ford rustled in to order a luncheon for twelve for the next noon.
Eugenia Ford was small and fair, and as exquisitely dainty and delicate as a French doll. She was universally conceded to be the prettiest girl in the entering class, and the petting she had received had gone to her head.
“If her grandmother dies before long, she may get a little real expression into her face, and then she’ll be the college beauty,” somebody had said about her.
“It will take heaps more than losing her grandmother to put any expression into Eugenia’s face,” Georgia Ames had retorted wisely.
At present Eugenia was certainly as vain and frivolous as she was pretty, and very badly spoiled indeed.
“Good-afternoon, Miss—Miss Welch,” she began in businesslike tones.