“Yes, a complete failure,” repeated Lilian distinctly. “Isn’t it queer? She’s really very clever, you know, and awfully amusing, besides being so amazingly beautiful. But there is a little footless streak of contrariness in her–we noticed it at boarding-school,–and it seems to have completely spoiled her.”
“It is queer, if she is all that you say. Perhaps next year she’ll be—”
“Oh, she isn’t coming back next year,” broke in Lilian. “She hates it here, you know, and she sees that she’s made a mess of it, too, though she wouldn’t admit it in a torture chamber. She thinks she has shown that college is beneath her talents, I suppose.”
“Little goose! Is she so talented?”
“Yes, indeed. She sings beautifully and plays the guitar rather well–she’d surely have made one of the musical clubs next year–and she can act, and write clever little stories. Oh, she’d have walked into everything going all right, if she hadn’t been such a goose–muddled her work and been generally offish and horrid.”
“Too bad,” said Miss Payson, rising with a groan. “Who do you think are the bright and shining stars among the freshmen, Lil?”
“Why Marion Lustig for literary ability, of course, and Emily Davis for stunts and Christy Mason for general all-around fineness, and socially–oh, let me think–the B’s, I should say, and–I forget her name–the little girl that Dottie King is so fond of. Here, take my arm, Margaret. You’ve got to get home some way, you know.”
Their voices trailed off into murmurs that grew fainter and fainter until the silence of the river and the wood was again unbroken. Eleanor sat up stiffly and stretched her arms above her head in sheer physical relief after the strain of utter stillness. Then, with a little sobbing cry, she leaned forward, bowing her head in her hands. Paradise–had they named it so because one ate there of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?
“A little footless streak!”
“An utter failure!”