“Oh, mother dear,” she began, “perhaps I ought to teach too, like Nan. I don’t believe I could, ever in the world, but I suppose every college girl ought to be able to, and I could try.”
“Betty Wales,” mother ordered solemnly, “unpack your trunk just enough to satisfy Dorothy’s curiosity, and then go to bed. You’re worn out, and as nervous as a witch. Just because I’ve decided not to keep a seamstress in the house this winter, and Nan is tired of society and jumps at an excuse to do a little teaching, you decide that the family is on the way to the poorhouse.”
“It isn’t only that——” Betty stopped. She had started to say that father looked worried, and didn’t joke back at all when you teased him; but perhaps that only seemed so to-night because she was fatigued herself from too much gaiety at Harding.
So she hunted out six assorted neck-bows for the gray kitten, six hair ribbons from Paris for the kitten’s small mistress, a Dutch doll, and a long chain strung with tiny silver charms, each with a story of its own; and having assured the smallest sister that this was only a beginning of the treasures she might expect, Betty went to bed and dreamed that she had lost her emergency fund under the teacher’s desk in Nan’s schoolroom, and had to teach a class in senior “English Lit.” before she could get it back. But she couldn’t remember when Shakespeare was born, and the girls stood up on their desks and waved their handkerchiefs and screamed, and she waved too, because it was the Harvard-Cambridge boat race on the Thames. No, it was brother Will calling her to breakfast, and little Dorothy saying in a sepulchral whisper, “Oh, hush, Will! Mother said Betty was to sleep over.”
“Coming! Wouldn’t sleep over for anything!” Betty called back, making a rush for her bath.
It was such a jolly day. People kept dropping in to say welcome home, and to tease Nan about her “latest fad,” as everybody called it. In the evening there was a regular party of Betty’s and Will’s friends on the big piazza, and before it was over Betty had promised to help at six “coming-out” teas, take part in one play, be on the committee to get up another, join a morning French class and a reading-club, and consider taking a cross-country ride every Saturday afternoon as long as the good weather lasted.
Up-stairs in her room she took down the rose-colored satin dress she had bought in Paris, and examined it approvingly. But one simply couldn’t wear the same thing at six receptions. There was her graduating dress, of course, but styles had changed frightfully since spring. If only Katie were here to use her magic touch on the pink lace evening gown that Bob had stepped on at class-supper!
“I never can mend it myself!” sighed Betty. “I shall need another afternoon dress anyway, and a suit, and I did want a new riding habit. Mine is horribly rusty. I wonder how careful about money we’ve got to be. And I wonder if Will thought to bolt the piazza door.”
She slipped on a kimono and crept softly down the stairs, a slim, golden-haired ghost in a trailing robe of silk and lace. Will hadn’t locked the door. And there was a light in the library, though it was long after midnight.
“It’s Nan, probably, reading up things to teach. I’ll go in and bother her and make her come to bed.”