“She’s losing her sporting spirit,” declared Madeline sadly. “In days gone by you could depend on Betty’s turning up for any old lark. She might be late, if she happened to be pretty busy, but she always got there in the end.”
“And I wanted to ask her about wedding dates,” wailed Babbie plaintively. “I can’t have my wedding when Betty can’t come. She’s almost as important as the groom.”
“Betty is awfully important to such a lot of people,” complained Mary Brooks Hinsdale, who was looking particularly fascinating in her new fall suit, the christening of which had added an extra spice of interest to the grand tea-drinking. “She is altogether too capable for her own good. If she were only as lazy, or as unreliable, or as devoid of ideas and energy, as most of those here present, she wouldn’t find it so hard to escape for tea-drinkings and other pleasant festivities. Which one of her dependents has her in its clutches this afternoon, I wonder?”
Babbie, to whom Betty’s note had been addressed, consulted it for further details. “She says she’s got to tutor a freshman,” Babbie explained after a minute. “I suppose she is helping along some one who can’t afford to pay for regular lessons. Seems to me there ought to be girls enough in college to do that sort of thing without putting it off on Betty. Betty is too valuable to be wasted on mere tutoring.”
“Poor girls ought not to need to be tutored,” announced Madeline, in her oracular manner. “Unless they are bright and shining lights in their studies, they ought not to try to go through college at all.”
“But Madeline——” chorused the permanent B. C. A.’s—the ones who were always on hand in Harding, because they were either faculty or faculty wives. “But Babbie—you two don’t understand. Haven’t you heard about Betty’s freshman?”
“No, we haven’t,” chorused the new arrivals. “Tell us this minute.”
Mary finally got the floor. “My children,” she began in her most patronizing style, “our precious Betty Wales is not engaged in assisting some needy under classman along the royal road to learning, as you seem to suppose. She is acting as special tutor to the only daughter of a Montana mining magnate. Named Montana Marie after the mine, pretty as a picture, clever at horseback riding but not at mathematics,—and the grand sensation of Harding College just at present,” ended Mary proudly. Then the permanents told the “properly excited” newcomers the whole story of Montana Marie O’Toole.
“She sounds extremely interesting,” said Madeline reflectively, when they had finished.
“Almost like a ready-made heroine,” suggested Mary, winking knowingly at the others.