“And then,” explained Betty practically, “I can have time enough to do justice to Morton Hall and”—very mysteriously—“to a lovely new plan that I have for the Tally-ho. Of course, as long as I’m going back anyhow, I won’t be mean enough not to ‘undertake’ Marie. But I hate having a lot of entirely different things to be responsible for, and I specially hate tutoring. I only hope this girl won’t cry all the time the way Eugenia Ford used to. It was fearfully embarrassing.”
“Tom Benson advises you to make her join an anti-flirt society first off,” Will put in solemnly. “He says it’s lucky Harding isn’t a co-educational college, because in that case it would take about two able-bodied chaperons to look after the gay Miss O’Toole.”
“Tell Tom Benson from me that I’m glad he’s at Yale instead of Winstead,” Betty retorted loftily. “A girl who wants to go to Harding badly enough to study all summer, take two sets of exams, and enter with three conditions hanging over her, isn’t as silly as Tom Benson seems to think.”
“Certainly not,” Mother defended her oddly-chosen favorite. “President Wallace must have seen her possibilities, or he wouldn’t have asked Betty to help her out. He evidently feels just as I do about her. I am sure that she has a naturally fine mind, and that she will respond very quickly to the cultivated atmosphere of the college. I doubt if Betty will need to do more than give her the most casual sort of instruction.”
Betty smiled to herself in the sheltering darkness of the piazza, where the family was spending the evening. Her private opinion coincided closely with Tom Benson’s, to the effect that even without the complications of co-education, Marie would be “a handful.” But President Wallace had hinted that he had a good reason which he was “not yet at liberty to communicate” for asking Betty to try to get Marie creditably through her freshman year; and, as Betty put it briefly to herself, it would be mean, just because it meant hard work, to refuse to do what the tragi-comical O’Tooles had set their hearts on.
So that matter was settled. The Students’ Aid work had developed so rapidly that Betty had petitioned for a senior assistant, and also, to the vast amusement of the Association’s managers, for a smaller salary for herself. Betty was bent on securing enough leisure to carry out her “lovely new plan” for the Tally-ho. Jim Watson may have had something to do with her feeling, or he may not; but, for one reason or another, Betty had what Madeline Ayres called a “leading” that this would be her last chance at Harding; and she wanted to “finish out” the Tally-ho, partly because she wished Mr. Morton to feel fully justified in his purchase and improvement of the property, but chiefly just to satisfy her own queer little sense of the fitness of things. The Tally-ho was capable of more than had ever yet been developed; and Betty liked people and institutions to do their very most and best. But the details of all this planning were kept a grand secret, even from the Smallest Sister, who had been the “Co.” in the Betty Wales business firm. Betty wanted to look over the situation at Harding first; then she would be ready to confide her conclusions to Co., Babbie and Madeline.
Betty Wales went back to Harding three days before the college opened, in order to get a good start with her work. But almost before she had stepped off the train she found herself up to her neck in a deluge of Students’ Aid affairs, all marked “immediate,” at least in the minds of the persons most concerned. It was a large factor in Betty’s success that she could always get the other person’s point of view; but there are occasions when this trait makes its possessor very uncomfortable. Betty wanted every girl who had applied for the Association’s help to get it, if she was worthy; she wanted every lonely freshman to be met at her train, every boarding-house keeper in search of waitresses, and every well-to-do student who hated to do her own mending, to feel that nobody could supply their varied wants so well as the Students’ Aid. The result was that one small secretary was shamefully overworked, almost forgot that she was supposed to be helping to run the most successful tea-room in Harding, and had no time to spend in worry over the probable bothers connected with tutoring Miss Marie O’Toole.
President Wallace was of course infinitely busier than Betty; all he had found time to do about Marie was to tell Betty, with a twinkle, that he had perfect confidence in her ability to manage “even the extraordinary product of a mining camp, a convent in Utah, a Select School for Wealthy American Girls in Paris, and the companionship of Mrs. James O’Toole; and to transform said product into a freshman that should be a real credit to Harding College.”
Whereupon Betty had gasped at the complicated things that were expected of her, laughed because President Wallace was laughing and seemed to expect that of her too, and then hurried off to find Miss Ferris and ask her if Mary Jones, the senior who lived in an attic at the other end of High Street, couldn’t somehow be persuaded to pocket her pride and come to fill an unexpected vacancy in Morton Hall.
She painstakingly met the train that Marie had written she would take; though either Marie had missed that train or Betty missed Marie. But with the capable assistance of Mary Brooks Hinsdale and Helen Adams she found Rachel and Christy, and Georgia Ames and Eugenia Ford found her. And the six of them, declaring that she looked tired to death and almost, if not quite, starved, bore her off to the Tally-ho for refreshment.