“And Eleanor of course,” put in Helen.
Betty shook her head. “No,” she said, “Eleanor wasn’t one.”
Helen looked perplexed. “I don’t see why. She writes better than any one in the class except Marion Lustig. Why hasn’t the ‘Argus’ printed any of her things this year, Betty?”
“She didn’t want them printed, I think, for one reason,” said Betty. “And doesn’t an editor have to do other things besides write? Perhaps Eleanor isn’t fitted for it in other ways.”
With that she escaped to the library. She had caught just a glimpse of Eleanor in the crowd and seen the hunted look that came to her face when somebody of Helen’s opinion said, “Of course you’re on the board, Miss Watson.”
“I wanted to choke her,” Betty reflected, “but I suppose she wasn’t to blame for not having listened to unpleasant gossip. Poor Eleanor! It’s going to be a hard day for her!”
Meanwhile little Helen Adams went blissfully home to the Belden. Several times on the way she pinched herself to make sure she was awake. Up in her own room in the quiet of the big empty house she sat down to think it all over. She had been very lonely during her freshman year—but that didn’t matter now. And the basket-ball song and the verses and the quaint little essay on apple-trees that the “Argus” had printed had meant long hours of hard work and discouraged waiting for the right words to come. But the struggles and discouragements didn’t matter now either, in the face of this glorious, wholly unlooked-for success.
Helen would have been amazed indeed if she could have heard Jean Eastman’s view of her position.
“Yes, I’m sorry for her,” Jean informed the Westcott House lunch table. “I think she’d have been happier without this. She won’t fit in with the others. They’ve all been prominent girls ever since freshman year, and she—oh, of course, she has some nice friends, but only the ones she was thrown with at Mrs. Chapin’s and some freshmen she met through her roommate. She isn’t in Dramatic Club or Clio, and she’s never had any office in the class. She’ll feel the difference now, and realize how she’s been left out from everything else.”
“Do you think so? Now I can’t imagine anything more exciting than to be a ‘dark horse,’” volunteered a bright-eyed little sophomore at the end of the table. “Why, everybody is talking about her to-day. ‘Who’s Helen Adams?’ That’s what they all want to know. It must be splendid to take people by surprise and just make them find out about you.”