Time flies between Thanksgiving and Christmas, particularly for freshmen who are looking forward to their first vacation at home. It flies faster after they get there, and when they are back at college it rushes on quite as swiftly but rather less merrily toward the fateful “mid-years.” None of the Chapin house girls had been home at Thanksgiving time, but they were all going for Christmas, except Eleanor Watson, who intended to spend the vacation with an aunt in New York.
They prepared for the flitting in characteristic ways. Rachel, who was very systematic, did all her Christmas shopping, so that she needn’t hurry through it at home. Roberta made but one purchase, an illustrated “Alice in Wonderland,” for her small cousins, and spent all her spare time in re-reading it herself. Helen, in spite of Betty’s suggestions about leaning back on her reputation, studied harder than ever, so that she could go home with a clear conscience, while Katherine was too excited to study at all, and Mary Brooks jeered impartially at both of them. Betty conscientiously returned all her calls and began packing several days ahead, so as to make the time seem shorter. Then just as the expressman was driving off with her trunk, she remembered that she had packed her short skirt at the very bottom.
“Thank you ever so much. If he’d got much further I should have had to go home either in this gray bath robe that I have on, or in a white duck suit,” she said to Katherine who had gone to rescue the skirt and came back with it over her arm.
She and Katherine started west together and Eleanor and Roberta went with them to the nearest junction. The jostling, excited crowd at the station, the “good-byes” and “Merry Christmases,” were great fun. Betty, remembering a certain forlorn afternoon in early autumn, laughed happily to herself.
“What’s the joke?” asked Katherine.
“I was thinking how much nicer things like this seem when you’re in them,” she said, waving her hand to Alice Waite.
At the Cleveland station, mother and Will and Nan and the smallest sister were watching eagerly for the returning wanderer.
“Why, Betty Wales, you haven’t changed one bit,” announced the smallest sister in tones of deepest wonder. “Why, I’d have known you anywhere, Betty, if I’d met you on the street.”
“Three months isn’t quite as long as all that,” said Betty, hugging the smallest sister, “but I was hoping I looked a little older. Nobody ever mistakes me for a senior, as they do Rachel Morrison. And I ought to look years and years wiser.”