“Oh, excuse me,” begged Montana Marie contritely. “I’m a dreadful bother. I talk too much. When you finish the book, could you show me a little about these originals that come after the twenty-sixth proposition?”
The Concentrating Influence had not forgotten her solid geometry. With casual assistance from her, and the definite and determined help of Mary Brooks Hinsdale and her corps of selected tutors, Montana Marie was making some slight progress. Betty’s part was to keep Marie fully impressed with the slightness of the progress and the need for keeping up all of her work instead of letting part slide while she devoted herself to the mastery of one particularly troublesome subject; also to preach her tactful little sermons about the rights of roommates who were too obliging to object to being imposed upon. After one of these lectures Montana Marie always presented the Concentrating Influence with candy or flowers in absurdly generous quantities.
But it was not the candy and flowers that made the junior from Corey Corners feel as if, after having “scraped along” for years, she had suddenly begun to live. It was Montana Marie’s unconscious assumption that she, Cordelia Payson, was a wonderful person, that all Harding College thought so, that girls like Georgia Ames and the Duttons and even that snobbish Eugenia Ford had noticed how well she did in argument, had been sorry she didn’t “make” the class hockey team, and had wished they knew her better.
Montana Marie could not help saying pleasant things; she had been educated to do so. She could not help admiring mental concentration; Betty Wales had talked nothing else to her all the year and “Connie” illustrated all Betty’s points as perfectly as if she had been created for no other purpose.
So it was small credit to Montana Marie that she made Cordelia Payson happy. Neither was it at all to her credit that she was instrumental in bringing Jim Watson hot-foot to Harding to investigate the supposedly prevailing dissatisfaction with Morton Hall, and incidentally to give the overworked Betty Wales two splendid, all-the-afternoon rides, and, in addition, the restful feeling that she was being looked after by a resourceful and a resolute young man.
It all came about in this way. One day when Marie had finished a Latin lesson with Mrs. Hinsdale, that lady walked back to the campus with her pupil on the way to a reception in town. Mary inquired solicitously for Betty, whom she had not seen for several days.
“She’s all right, I guess,” explained Marie easily. “Only she’s sort of absent-minded, and I notice that she doesn’t eat much.”
“She’s overdoing dreadfully,” sighed Mary.
Montana Marie considered. “As far as I have noticed I should say that a person feels better for working hard. Ma does nothing, and Pa never takes a vacation, and he’s a lot stronger than Ma is, and happier. But work is one thing, and worry is another,” sighed Marie. “Worrying uses a person up like anything. Maybe Miss Wales has something on her mind. Who is this Mr. Jim Watson that you all tease her about, Mrs. Hinsdale?”
Mary explained, with a dignity that was quite lost on Montana Marie, about Jim and Eleanor, Jim and Morton Hall, and Jim and Betty.