“Goosie!” said Betty, rising abruptly. “I know you girls want to go to bed. We’ll talk it all over to-morrow.”
As she closed the door, Rachel and Katherine exchanged glances. “I told you there was trouble,” said Katherine, “and mark my words, Eleanor Watson is at the bottom of it somehow.”
“Don’t let’s notice it again, though,” answered the considerate Rachel. “She evidently doesn’t want to tell us about it.”
Betty undressed almost in silence. Her exhilaration had left her all at once and her ambition; life looked very complicated and unprofitable. As she went over to turn out the light, she noticed a sheet of paper, much erased and interlined, on Helen’s desk. “Have you begun your song already?” she asked.
“Oh, no, I wrote a theme,” said Helen with what seemed needless embarrassment. But the theme was a little verse called “Happiness.” She got it back the next week heavily under-scored in red ink, and with a succinct “Try prose,” beneath it; but she was not discouraged. She had had one turn; she could afford to wait patiently for another, which, if you tried long enough and cared hard enough must come at last.
CHAPTER XVI
A CHANCE TO HELP
Eleanor Watson had gotten neither class spirit nor personal ambition from 19–’s “glorious old defeat,” as Katherine called it. The Saturday afternoon of the game she had spent, greatly to the disgust of her friends, on the way to New York, whither she went for a Sunday with Caroline Barnes. Caroline’s mother had been very ill, and the European trip was indefinitely postponed, but the family were going for a shorter jaunt to Bermuda. Caroline begged Eleanor to join them. “You can come as well as not,” she urged. “You know your father would let you–he always does. And we sail the very first day of your vacation too.”
“But you stay three weeks,” objected Eleanor, “and the vacation is only two.”
“What’s the difference? Say you were ill and had to stay over,” suggested Caroline promptly.