“There’s unfortunately nothing rumorous about these exams.,” muttered Katherine wrathfully. “The one I had to-day was the real article, all right.”
“And I have my three worst to-morrow and next day,” mourned Betty, “so I’ve got permission to sit up after ten to-night. Don’t all the rest of you want to come in here and work? Then some one else can ask Mrs. Chapin for the other nights.”
“But we must all attend strictly to business,” said Mary Rich, whereat Helen Adams looked relieved.
And business was the order of the week. An unwonted stillness reigned over the Chapin house, broken occasionally by wild outbursts of hilarity, which meant that some examination or other was over and had not been so bad after all. Every evening at ten the girls who felt it necessary to sit up later assembled in one room, comfortably attired in kimonos–all except Roberta, who had never been seen without her collar–and armed with formidable piles of books; and presently work began in earnest. There was really no reason, as Rachel observed, why they should not stay in their own rooms, if they were going to sit up at all. This wasn’t the campus, where there was a night-watchman to report lights, and Mrs. Chapin was very accommodating about giving permission.
“This method benefits her gas bill though,” said Katherine, “and therefore keeps her accommodating. Besides, it’s much easier to stick to it in a crowd.”
Eleanor never went through the formality of asking Mrs. Chapin’s permission to do anything, and she did not care for the moral support of numbers. She was never sleepy, she said, pointing significantly to her brass samovar, and she could work best alone in her own room. She held aloof, too, from the discussions about the examinations which were the burden of the week’s table-talk, only once in a while volunteering a suggestion about the possible answer to an obscure or ambiguous question. Her ideas invariably astonished the other freshmen by their depth and originality, but when any one exclaimed, Eleanor would say, sharply, “Why, it’s all in the text-book!” and then relapse into gloomy silence.
“I suppose she talks more to her friends outside,” suggested Rachel, after an encounter of this sort.
“Not on your life,” retorted Katherine. “She’s one of the kind that keeps herself to herself. She hates us because we have to know as much about her as we do, living here in the house with her. I hope she gets through all right.”
“She’s awfully clever,” said Mary Rich admiringly. “She’d never have said that a leviathan was some kind of a church creed, as I did in English.”
“Yes, she’s a clever–blunderer, but she’s also a sadly mistaken young person,” amended Katherine.