“No,” explained Eugenia. “I didn’t tell her anything about it. I just dropped it on your desk. I thought you’d notice it and read it, and if you found anything fearfully wrong, I could fix it over.”
“But I don’t understand what theme it was. We went over all those that I assigned; and you revised them, and then we went over them again.”
“This was my ‘final,’” explained Eugenia.
“Your ‘final’!” Betty’s tone was full of dismay. “But I wasn’t to see that, Eugenia. That’s to be entirely your own work, like all the themes you handed in before you were warned. Don’t you remember I told you how Miss Raymond called a meeting of English tutors to explain that they were to give no help of any kind on the ‘final’ theme; and she announced it in classes too, didn’t she?”
“Oh, yes, if you take it that way”—Eugenia assumed an air of injured innocence. “Most of the tutors don’t. You see, Miss Wales, some of the girls are worried to death and bother their tutors for ideas and pointers until the poor things just about write their freshmen’s themes to get rid of them. Of course they won’t—or they oughtn’t to—do that with the ‘final.’ That’s the help Miss Raymond meant.”
“So is reading it over and making suggestions giving help,” Betty objected. “She meant help of any kind—or at least that was what she said.”
Eugenia shrugged her shoulders. “All right,” she said. “There’s no harm done, as long as you haven’t even seen the old thing. It’s due to-morrow anyway, and all I expected you to tell me was little things like misspelled words or slips of the pen. I couldn’t copy it all over to-night possibly.”
Betty always tried to put the best construction on actions that didn’t seem to her quite honorable. “Oh, if that’s all you wanted, why I don’t suppose any one would object. But it’s better to keep exactly to Miss Raymond’s regulations, don’t you think so? If you try hard, you can find little things like misspelled words for yourself. You will go over it carefully, won’t you?” Betty added earnestly. “I heard of a girl once who was conditioned on account of bad spelling. That would be a perfect shame, after all the time we’ve spent studying really hard things like outlines.”
While she talked, Betty was looking through her pigeonholes, where neat little piles of bills and memoranda for the different parts of the tea-room business were kept. After one week of chaos she had decided that order was the first law of business; and since then her desk had been a model of neatness and system.
“Where did you say you left the theme, Eugenia?” she asked after a minute, looking up from her search.