Montana Marie didn’t mind moving in, with the strong probability of having to move out again very soon; she had lived in trunks and hotels most of her life, and was used to picking up at a moment’s notice whenever her flyaway mother got tired of eating Swiss honey, or buying Dutch silver, or studying German art, and decided to move on.
The vacant room that Betty had advertised on the bulletin-board was a third floor single, but when the Thorn, who shared one of Morton Hall’s few doubles, begged quite pathetically for a chance to room alone, Betty had not the heart to refuse her. Secretly, too, she was relieved at the prospect of thus finally settling the question of Montana Marie’s coming into the house; for in spite of her protégée’s excellent logic, Betty doubted the wisdom of mixing such alien elements as Montana Marie and the Morton Hall girls, and if anybody suffered from the situation she felt sure it would not be the exuberant Montana Marie, with a mind of her own and a genius for getting what she wanted. Still Marie had been thoroughly in earnest in wanting to find a boarding place where she could study without interruption. Betty broke the news to her gently.
“Matilda Thorn’s—I mean Matilda Jones’s roommate,” she explained, “is a funny little junior from Corey Corners, New Hampshire. She taught a district school for two years, to earn money enough to justify her in beginning her college course. In the summers she is waitress in one of the big White Mountain hotels, not far from where she lives, and she usually earns a little extra by taking care of some rich woman’s children when their nurse wants a holiday or an evening off.”
Montana Marie listened intently. “She must know how to concentrate her mind, if she does all that. I should think she’d be an ideal roommate for me, shouldn’t you, Miss Wales? But maybe she won’t like me. Could you arrange to have us meet, Miss Wales, and then you could ask her to say honestly what she thought, and if she didn’t object to me I could move in right away.”
Montana Marie’s calm determination to look on the bright side of things took the wind out of Betty’s opposition, just as, a little later, her radiant, magnetic charm won from the rather washed-out, nervous junior from Corey Corners an eager assent to Betty’s proposal. Montana Marie, five trunks, a Mexican saddle and a striped Parisian hat-box containing a hat that was too big for any compartment in the pigskin hat trunk, appeared without loss of time at Morton Hall. Being systematic, Montana Marie immediately set to work at disposing of her possessions within the limited area of half a rather small room and half a very small closet. After an hour’s work and ten minutes’ thoughtful contemplation, she invited her new roommate, who was trying to write an argument paper, to go down-town and help find a carpenter. The roommate compromised by telling Marie where the best carpenter in Harding was to be found, and Marie went off happily. A minute later she reappeared with a question.
“I’m going to have him make me a box to go under my bed. Do you keep things under your bed? You don’t? Then do you mind if I have him make two boxes? I have such a silly lot of clothes. Oh, thank you so much. You’re the nicest roommate! Sure there are no errands I can do for you?”
Without looking up from her work, the strenuous little junior said no to that, for at least the third time; but when Marie presented her with a box of chocolates, evidently as a reward for being obliging about the bed-box, she relaxed her Spartan discipline and ate so much candy that she had indigestion, and was compelled to finish her argument paper in a style far inferior to that in which she had begun it. This adventure made her wary, and however easily the rest of Morton Hall fell into Montana Marie’s enticing snares, her roommate kept aloof. Her name was Cordelia Payson, but Montana Marie always referred to her by Fluffy Dutton’s title, “The Concentrating Influence,” which Straight Dutton shortened, for her own and others’ convenience, to “Connie.”
The carpenter recommended by “Connie” duly produced two bed-boxes, after Montana Marie’s design, which included castors, brass handles for pulling them out and lifting the covers, and interior upholstery of pale blue satin, violet-scented. When they were delivered, Montana Marie again attacked the problem of emptying the five trunks which had effectively blocked the hallway since her arrival. When she had done her best with the bed-boxes, there was still a trunkful of dresses to dispose of. Montana Marie again spent ten minutes in contemplation, and then sallied forth to order a closet pole arranged on a pulley, and equipped with two dozen dress-hangers.
“I’ll keep it up in that waste space under the ceiling,” she explained to the Concentrating Influence. “I’ll hang my evening dresses on it, and things I don’t like and seldom wear. When I want to let it down, it won’t kill me to empty out part of the closet on to some chairs. Otherwise,”—Montana Marie surveyed the tightly wedged mass of clothes cheerfully,—“otherwise I’m afraid it wouldn’t plough through that mass and drop down. I’ve got too many things, that’s evident. When mid-years are over and I have a little time to turn around in, I’ll sort them out and get rid of all but what I strictly need. And then,” she giggled cheerfully, “it will be time to get a lot of new clothes for spring. I love spring clothes, don’t you?”
“I’ve got to finish reading this book to-night,” the Concentrating Influence told her primly, planting her elbows on her desk, and stuffing her fingers into her ears.