“What’s the joke?” said a girl suddenly appearing around the corner of the Main Building.
“It was on me,” laughed Betty, “so you can’t expect me to tell you what it was.”
It had just occurred to her that, as there was no possibility of Eleanor’s finding out her part in Miss Ferris’s intervention, a reconciliation was as far away as ever. “She wouldn’t like it if she should find out,” thought Betty, “and perhaps it was just another tactless interference. Well, I’m glad I didn’t think of all these things sooner, for I believe it was the right thing to do, and it was a lot easier doing it while I hoped it might bring us together, as Nan said. I wonder what kind of things Nan meant.”
She dropped the note on the hall table and slipped softly up-stairs. As she sat down at her desk she looked at the clock and hesitated. It was not so late as she had thought, only quarter of nine. There was still time to go back to the Belden. But after a moment’s wavering Betty began getting out of her dress and into a kimono. Since the day of the basket-ball game she had honestly tried not to let the little things interfere with the big, nor the mere “interruptions” that were fun and very little more loom too large in her scale of living. “Livy to-night and golf to-morrow,” she told the green lizard, as she sat down again and went resolutely to work.
When Eleanor came in to dinner the next evening Betty could hardly conceal her excitement. Would she say anything? If she said nothing what would it mean? The interview had apparently not been a stormy one. Eleanor looked tired, but not in the least disturbed or defiant. She ate her dinner almost in silence, answering questions politely but briefly and making none of her usual effort to control and direct the conversation. But just as the girls were ready to leave the table she broke her silence. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I want to ask you please to forget all the foolish things I said last night at dinner. I’ve said them a good many times, and I can’t contradict them to every one, but I can here–and I want to. I’ve thought more about it since yesterday, and I see that I hadn’t at all the right idea of the situation. The students at a college are supposed to be old enough to do the right thing about vacations without the attaching of any childish penalty to the wrong thing. But we all of us get careless; then a public sentiment must be created against the wrong things, like cutting over. That was what the registrar was trying to do. Anybody who stays over as I did makes it less possible to do without rules and regulations and penalties–in other words hurts the tone of the college, just as a man who likes to live in a town where there are churches but never goes to them himself, unfairly throws the responsibility of church-going on to the rest of the community. I hadn’t thought of it in that way; I didn’t mean to be a shirk, but I was one.”
A profound silence greeted Eleanor’s argument. Mary Rich, who had been loud in her championship of Eleanor’s sentiments the night before, looked angry at this sudden desertion; and Mary Brooks tried rather unsuccessfully not to smile. The rest were merely astonished at so sudden a change of mind. Finally Betty gave a little nervous cough and in sheer desperation began to talk. “That’s a good enough argument to change any one’s mind,” she said. “Isn’t it queer how many different views of a subject there are?”
“Of some subjects,” said Eleanor pointedly.
It was exactly what Betty should have expected, but she couldn’t help being a little disappointed. Eleanor had just shown herself so fine and downright, so willing to make all the reparation in her power for a course whose inconsistency had been proved to her. It was very disheartening to find that she cherished the old, reasonless grudge as warmly as ever. But if Betty had accomplished nothing for herself, she had done all that she hoped for Eleanor, and she tried to feel perfectly satisfied.
“I think too much about myself, anyway,” she told the green lizard, who was the recipient of many confidences about this time.
The rest of the month sped by like the wind. As Betty thought it over afterward, it seemed to have been mostly golf practice and bird club. Roberta organized the bird club. Its object, according to her, was to assist Mary Brooks with her zoology by finding bird haunts and conveying Mary to them; its ultimate development almost wrought Mary’s ruin. Mary had elected a certain one year course in zoology on the supposition that one year, general courses are usually “snaps,” and the further theory that every well conducted student will have one “snap” on her schedule. These propositions worked well together until the spring term, when zoology 1a resolved itself into a bird-study class. Mary, who was near-sighted, detested bird-study, and hardly knew a crow from a kinglet, found life a burden, until Roberta, who loved birds and was only too glad to get a companion on her walks in search of them, organized what she picturesquely named “the Mary-bird club.” Rachel and Adelaide immediately applied for admission, and about the time that Mary appropriated the forget-me-nots that Katherine had gathered for Marion Lawrence and wore them to a dance on the plea that they exactly matched her evening dress, and also decoyed Betty into betraying her connection with the freshman grind-book, Katherine and Betty joined. They seldom accompanied the club on its official walks, preferring to stroll off by themselves and come back with descriptions of the birds they had seen for Mary and Roberta to identify. Occasionally they met a friendly bird student who helped them with their identifications on the spot, and then, when Roberta was busy, they would take Mary out in search of “their birds,” as they called them. Oddly enough they always found these rare species a second time, though Mary, because of her near-sightedness, had to be content with a casual glance at them.