“You’re not stupid,” Betty encouraged her. “If you’ll only keep on trying——”
“Oh, I shall keep trying.” Montana Marie was firm as a rock on that point. “I’ve inherited my father’s stick-to-itiveness, if I haven’t inherited his brains. Now I might have been a flyaway like Ma. And in that case things would have been pretty hopeless, wouldn’t they, Miss Wales?”
Two days later Montana Marie appeared at Betty’s office, the fire of determination in her lovely eyes.
“I saw a sign on the bulletin-board that said there was an unexpected vacancy in Morton Hall. Is that so?”
Betty nodded abstractedly, her finger on the place where she had left off reading a letter from Mr. Morton.
“Then I want to fill it. I’ve got to leave the Vincent Arms because it’s too diverting to my mind. If I could live in the dormitory with you, I should be made!”
“But Morton Hall is a special dormitory,” Betty explained patiently, as she had many times before, to admirers who had thought it would be the making of them to live in “her dormitory.” “And you’re not eligible.” She went into details. “So you can’t possibly come, and if you could I don’t think you’d like it. The harder a person works the more she needs recreation. But most of my girls have had too much work and too little play all their lives long. They don’t know how to play the way Georgia Ames and Miss Hart and the Duttons do. You’d find them dull after the others.”
“Then in that case my mind would stay right on my work. I’m just the opposite from them, Miss Wales. I’ve had too much play and too little work all my life until now. They say opposites attract, so I’m sure I should get along splendidly with those girls.”
“But you’re not eligible,” Betty repeated.
Montana Marie considered that. “Suppose no poor girl wants to come in just at present,” she suggested at last. “Moving in the middle of the term is a bother, isn’t it? Don’t most girls promise to keep their rooms right through the term or even for the whole year? Couldn’t I have the room as long as it is empty,—just until some eligible girl wants it?”