Betty said formally, “Thank you, I should like to,” and Helen, pleased and eager, chorused, “So should I.”
Later, in their own room, Betty said with apparent carelessness but with the covert intention of dropping Helen a useful hint, “You aren’t going to see Miss Barnes, are you? I’m not.”
And Helen had flushed again, gave some stammering reply and then had had for the first time an unkind thought about her roommate. Betty wanted to keep all her nice friends to herself. It must be that. Why shouldn’t she go to see Miss Barnes? She wasn’t asked so often that she could afford to ignore the invitations she did get. And later she added, Why shouldn’t she ask Miss Barnes to the play, since Eleanor wasn’t going to?
So one afternoon Helen, arrayed in her best clothes, went down to call and deliver her invitation. Miss Barnes was out, but her door was open and Helen slipped in, and writing a little note on her card, laid it conspicuously on the shining mahogany desk.
That was one invitation. She had given the other to a quiet, brown-eyed girl who sat next her in geometry, not from preference, but because her name came next on the class roll. This girl declined politely, on the plea of another engagement.
Next day Miss Barnes brushed unseeingly past her in the hall of the Science Building. The day after that they met at gym. Finally, when almost a week had gone by without a sign from her, Helen inquired timidly if she had found the note.
“Oh, are you Miss Adams?” inquired Miss Barnes, staring past her with a weary air. “Thank you very much I’m sure, but I can’t come,” and she walked off.
Any one but Helen Adams would have known that Caroline Barnes and Eleanor Watson had the reputation of being the worst “snobs” in their class, and that Miss Ashby, her neighbor in geometry, boarded with her mother and never went anywhere without her. But Helen knew no college gossip. She offered her invitation to two girls who had been in the dancing-class, read hypocrisy into their hearty regrets that they were going out of town for Sunday, and asked no one else to the play. If she had been less shy and reserved she would have told Rachel or Betty all about her ill-luck, have been laughed at and sympathized with, and then have forgotten all about it. But being Helen Chase Adams, she brooded over her trouble in secret, asked nobody’s advice, and grew shyer and more sensitive in consequence, but not a whit less determined to make a place for herself in the college world.
She would have attached less significance to Caroline Barnes’s rudeness, had she known a little about the causes of Eleanor’s headache. Eleanor had gone down to Caroline’s on the afternoon of the play, knocked boldly, in spite of a “Don’t disturb” sign posted on the door, and found the pretty rooms in great confusion and Caroline wearily overseeing the packing of her books and pictures.
Eleanor waited patiently until the men had gone off with three huge boxes, and then insisted upon knowing what Caroline was doing.