CHAPTER XI
THE BEGUILING OF THE SMALLEST SISTER
With mid-years safely behind her, Montana Marie fairly radiated happiness.
“I’m anchored here till June all right, I guess,” she giggled joyously. “If I don’t do something extra-specially silly, I guess I can certainly stay till June. And now that I’ve caught on to the rights of this concentration business, why, I can enjoy myself a little. No, I’m not worrying about next near. I never worry about things so far off as next year. Besides, maybe by next year——” Montana Marie shrugged her shoulders with truly Parisian éclat, and blithely refused to finish her sentence.
Montana Marie’s idea of a good time seemed to center around things to eat. She became a Perfect Patron of the Tally-ho, and almost every evening she gave a chafing-dish party in her room. Connie could not afford to waste her evenings over chafing-dish parties, but she was too obliging to complain. So she merely disappeared, just before the parties were due to arrive, spent her evenings studying with the Thorn or reading in the college library, and was unaffectedly delighted when, just as the fudge was cool enough to eat, or the rarebit done to a turn, Montana Marie left her guests to search Morton Hall from top to bottom for her missing roommate.
“The eats are served,” she would announce with a giggle, when she had discovered Connie’s whereabouts. “We’re only waiting for you, so hurry along, and bring all your friends.”
Montana Marie could never learn the names of the Morton Hall girls. “They all look alike to me,” she declared, and hospitably invited any and all that she met in the corridors to come and have “eats,” and meet the Duttons and Georgia and Susanna Hart and Timmy Wentworth. Marie was past-mistress of the difficult art of “mixing crowds.” After her advent Morton Hall suddenly took its place as a social center among the other campus houses. The Belden invited the Morton to be its partner in getting up a house-play. It was discovered that two of the sophomore basket-ball team lived in the Morton, and one “Argus” editor. The monthly house spreads, which Betty had started in the interests of general sociability, suddenly blossomed out into popular campus functions. The Morton Hallites were learning to play as well as they worked, and it was Montana Marie O’Toole who had taught them. Betty Wales smiled as she remembered how hard she had tried to keep Marie out of the house.
“I guess it’s generally the best plan to let things sort of decide themselves,” she reflected. “Then if they go wrong, you can blame it on the things, and with me, anyway, they usually go right—only there are some things that just won’t decide themselves.” Betty Wales was not thinking of the Tally-ho Catering Department (which was deciding to be the howling success that Babbie had predicted), nor of the Student’s Aid Secretaryship, nor of Montana Marie O’Toole, among whose faults was certainly not to be ranked a lack of decision.
“Oh, goodness me!” said Betty Wales at last to the open fire in her cheerful sitting-room at Morton Hall. “A girl ought to know her own mind. I’m old enough to know what I want. I’m grown up. But I don’t feel a bit grown up. I just hate flirts. It’s perfectly dreadful to keep a nice man on the string. But he won’t let me say no—and I’m not ready to say yes—not to anybody—yet.”
The little Student’s Aid Secretary put on an old skirt, a white sweater, and a fuzzy white cap, and went off for a solitary tramp in the snow.
“Anyhow it’s better to wait till you’re quite sure what you want than to decide wrong and be very unhappy about it afterward,” she thought, as, looking very young and irresponsible and contented once more, she shook the snow out of her hair and hurried in to her place at the head of a Morton Hall dinner table.