“Easily,” Mary Brooks assured her. “Only don’t forget, all of you, whether you have been elected tutors yet or whether you haven’t, that you’ve each and all got to help. The B. C. A.’s have adopted a new object—we have undertaken Montana Marie O’Toole—and it may need our entire combined effort to make her a credit to us and to Harding. But we’ve got to do it. And do it we will!”
“Hear! Hear!” from Madeline.
“The B. C. A.’s to the Rescue!” cried Helen.
“Betty Wales and her freshman!” added Christy.
They drank the toasts with much enthusiasm in fresh cups of tea—poured out without the use of a strainer, because the next “feature” on the program was to be tea-ground fortunes all around, read by that past-mistress of the fine art of making everything interesting, Miss Madeline Ayres.
CHAPTER VI
THE INTERVENTION OF JIM
Montana Marie O’Toole accepted with her accustomed submissive sweetness the new tutors “elected” to office by Mary Brooks Hinsdale and tactfully introduced to their victim by Betty Wales, who explained just why she had consented to a division of labor.
“They do seem to make me understand better,” Marie told Betty, a few days after the beginning of the new régime. “That Miss Mason is awfully smart, isn’t she? But fortunately she isn’t anything like that smart tutor I had last summer. Miss Mason makes me puzzle things out for myself. It takes a lot of her valuable time, I’m afraid.” Poor Marie sighed deeply. “It’s a great responsibility, wasting the time of a faculty and a—what’s that Miss Mason is?—oh, yes, a Fellow in Mathematics. And I can’t pay Miss Adams, because it is against the rules for the faculty to be paid for tutoring. Is it against the rules for me to send her flowers every day, Miss Wales?”
Betty remembered how violets used to make Helen’s eyes shine, and said no. “Only you mustn’t be extravagant, you know. Every day is much too often to send flowers.”
“I can’t say that I think it’s any too often to get flowers,” smiled Montana Marie. “And so far Pa hasn’t objected to any of my bills. It’s fortunate, isn’t it, that my father isn’t as poor as I am stupid?”