“Wait a minute,” she commanded. “Of course it’s awfully queer up here, but still, if they have exams. I don’t see the use of cooking it all up beforehand. I mean I don’t see the use of exams. if it is all decided.”
Her two friends brightened perceptibly.
“That’s a good idea,” declared Betty. “Every one says the mid-years are so important. Let’s do our best from now on, and perhaps the faculty will change their minds.”
As she walked home, Betty thought of Eleanor. “She’ll be dreadfully worried. I shan’t tell her a word about it,” she resolved. Then she remembered Mary Brooks’s remark. Yes, no doubt some one else would enlighten Eleanor. It was just too bad. But perhaps Mary was right and the story was only a story.
It is hard for freshmen on the eve of their mid-year examinations to be perfectly calm and philosophical. The story of the fifty unfortunates ran like wild-fire through the college, and while upper-class girls sniffed at it as absurd and even freshmen, particularly the clever ones, pooh-poohed it in public, it was the cause of many anxious, and some tearful moments. Betty, after her first fright, had accepted the situation with her usual cheerfulness, and so had Alice and Rachel, who could not help knowing that her work was of exceptionally high grade, while Helen irritated her house-mates by affecting an anxiety which, as Katherine put it, “No dig, who gets ‘good’ on all her written work, can possibly feel.” Katherine was worried about her mathematics, in which she had been warned before Thanksgiving, but she confided to Betty that she had counted them up, and without being a bit conceited she really thought there were fifty stupider girls in the class of 19–. Roberta and the Riches, however, were utterly miserable, and Eleanor wrote to Paul West that she was busy–she had written “ill” first, and then torn up the note–and indulged in another frantic fit of industry, even more violent than its predecessors had been.
“But I thought you wanted to go home,” said Betty curiously one afternoon when Eleanor had come in to borrow a lexicon. “You say you hate it here, and you hate to study. So why do you take so much trouble about staying?”
Eleanor straightened proudly. “Haven’t you observed yet that I have a bad case of the Watson pride?” she asked. “Do you think I’d ever show my face again if I failed?”
“Then why—” began Betty.
“Oh, that’s the unutterable laziness that I get from my–from the other side of the house,” interrupted Eleanor. “It’s an uncomfortable combination, I assure you,” and taking the book she had come for, she abruptly departed.
Betty realized suddenly that in all the year Eleanor had never once spoken of her mother.