“Oh, Miss Wales,” she cried eagerly. “Here I am, and I need your help right away. Where can I find a set of the college rules—about calls, and crushes, and sitting on tables like this one, and so on?”
“And passing exams in freshman math.,” murmured Fluffy wickedly, hazarding a guess that Marie’s brain was not of the exact, scientific variety. “How do you do, Betty? I’m coming to the Tally-ho for tea and a talk to-night—Straight too. You’ll be there?”
Betty said yes, trying to look properly reproachful and not succeeding at all. Meanwhile the crowd had drawn back, old girls having whispered to the gaping freshmen that Miss Wales was a “near-faculty.”
“Shall we come over to my office?” Betty suggested, nodding right and left to girls she recognized. Marie covered her silken elegance with a natty white polo coat, and thoughtfully insisted on carrying the umbrella over Betty on the way back to her office.
“Just look at that, Miss Wales,” she began, as soon as they were seated, handing Betty a printed list of the accepted freshman candidates. “I’m in. I wouldn’t believe it till I saw it down in black and white. And I’m the only O in a class of two hundred. Isn’t that funny, Miss Wales?”
Betty looked sympathetically at the name of the only O in the freshman class. There it was, down in black and white: Montana Marie O’Toole.
“Oh, how f——” began Betty, who was fast being overwhelmed by the accumulating absurdities of her protégée. “Why, I—I thought Marie was your first name.”
Marie giggled. “I’m always called Marie—now. Ma would be awfully mad if she saw that ridiculous old Montana cropping out again. But they told us, when I took my first exams, to put down our full names. I asked if ‘M. Marie’ wouldn’t do, and the teacher in charge of the room just glared at me; so of course I wrote it all out in full about as quick as I could. You see, Miss Wales, I was born in a mining camp, and Pa named me after the claim where he’d struck it rich the very day I came into the world. The Montana Mary it was called. When I went to Salt Lake to school I dropped the Montana, and when I went to Paris I changed Mary to Marie. Marie suits me better, don’t you think so, Miss Wales?”
Marie got up to shed her heavy polo coat, and stood, a dazzlingly pretty vision, smiling down at Betty with the half-pleading, half-commanding curve of her lips that made her so winning in spite of her crudities.
Betty smiled back at her. “You’ll be Montana Marie as long as you stay here,” she told her freshman. “So you’d better make up your mind to it. The girls always seize upon a queer name and use it. If you’d written just Marie, you might have been nicknamed something funny; so it would come to the same thing in the end. Now may I tell you a few things, please?”