“She will be perfectly safe on the Imp,” Georgia reported later to Betty. “At least I think so, and anyhow she is perfectly set on riding him, and she said she’d never ride old Polly again, if there wasn’t another horse in the world. So we shall just have to let her decide about the risks for herself. Your freshman has a mind of her own, hasn’t she, Betty?”
Betty agreed laughingly. Montana Marie, when approached by her official tutor about her freshman class work, particularly freshman math., had reported easily that she guessed everything was going all right.
“But anyway, I’m planning to get my entrance conditions off first,” she announced. “Then I can devote my whole time to regular work. I believe in being systematic, don’t you, Miss Wales?”
Betty tried to explain that the entrance conditions were regarded by the Powers as extras, not to take the place or time of regular work. Montana Marie listened good-naturedly.
“I never could do but one thing at once, Miss Wales,” she explained at last. “In Germany I forget every word I know of French, and in dear old Paree I actually almost forget my English. If I could only cut classes entirely for a week or so and get this entrance history and Latin prose off my mind!”
“Well, you can’t,” Betty told her decidedly. “Your having so many conditions will make all your teachers specially particular. The very least you can do, when President Wallace stretched a rule to let you in, is not to cut a single, single class, unless you are too ill to go, of course.”
Montana Marie sighed plaintively. “I never was ill in my life. I think I am doing fairly well in my studies, Miss Wales. I certainly try hard enough. After all the fuss I had about getting in, I don’t want to get out again yet a while. The great trouble is that there are so many social affairs all the time. When I’m looking forward to a dinner on the campus or a dance in the gym. or a walk with that cute little Miss Hart, why I just can’t settle down to study. It was lucky Miss Hart had an impromptu initiation for me. I shouldn’t have been able to learn a single lesson with an initiation to look forward to.”
“Then if it diverts your mind to go to things, you simply mustn’t go to so many, Marie.” Betty tried to look severe and to speak sternly. “You must refuse some of your invitations. Or else you must learn to concentrate your mind on whatever you’re doing, work as well as play. Being able to jump straight from Greek to the sophomore reception and from chemistry lab. into managing a basket-ball team is one of the most valuable things you can learn at this college. And you’ve got to learn it early in freshman year, or you won’t ever get comfortably through your mid-years.” Betty surveyed Montana Marie’s unruffled calm rather despairingly.
Montana Marie smiled comfortingly back at her tutor, and then sighed faintly. “I’m not sure, Miss Wales, that I have any mind to concentrate. You see in the convent your soul was the most important thing, and in Miss Mallon’s Select School for American Girls your manners and the pictures in the Louvre were the most important. But I promise you that I won’t go everywhere I’m asked—not anywhere until I’ve passed off my history. And I promise not to cut, and I’ll ask my teachers right away if my work is satisfactory.”
Betty wrote her mother that night that Marie was developing wonderfully, quite as Mrs. Wales had prophesied, and that taking charge of her was really no trouble at all, because she was so anxious to carry out her part of the bargain she had made with Betty, to do her best.