Madeline Ayres lounged comfortably on the back row and watched her companions struggling to express their opinions on “the topic previously assigned.” It happened to be the characteristics of Matthew Arnold. Madeline had exhausted the subject in five illegible lines, written in half as many minutes. She folded and signed her paper, and leaned forward to see how the girls on the row in front of her were progressing. Babe was chewing her pencil busily. Helen Adams was on her second page and—yes, she had actually divided her work into paragraphs! Madeline shrugged her shoulders, in token of her scorn for such foolishness, and looked at the clock. Then she glanced at the platform where Dr. Eaton sat, wearing his cold, slightly bored expression, and not showing the slightest interest in the spectacle before him.
Madeline Ayres differed from the majority in finding Dr. Eaton dull. His blasé air irritated, instead of interesting her, and she longed to startle him out of it, in spite of himself. Now she would try to do it. Lazily she reached out a long arm for the sheet of paper which Helen Adams had been hoarding against a possible emergency, and meeting Helen’s glance of protest with a pathetically beseeching gesture, she went to work again, as if her life depended upon filling that sheet before the gong struck.
“I have forgotten the exact wording of the topic,” wrote Madeline slowly, in a painstaking backhand that she resorted to in times of stress, “but ‘Matthew Arnold and the Ten-Minute Test’ occurs to me as an interesting point of departure. How would Matthew Arnold view a ten-minute exposition of his characteristic qualities by a class of young ladies (most of them deep-dyed Philistines)? I fancy he would say——”
Madeline had made her point and turned several neat sentences before the “remaining ten minutes” was exhausted. She folded her second sheet as she had her first, paused an instant before writing “Georgia Ames” on the outside, and giving both the papers to Babe to hand in, went out by the back door. Half an hour later she had forgotten all about Dr. Eaton in a heated pursuit of grasshoppers on the back campus. Biology was Madeline’s newest hobby.
She was late for English Essayists the next morning. The class had been called to order and Professor Eaton was beginning to read something to them. Madeline dropped into a seat near the door, found the place in her note-book, and shook her fountain-pen into working-order, before she realized that he was reading Georgia Ames’s remarks upon “Matthew Arnold and the Ten-Minute Test,” with evident liking for Georgia’s ideas. Some of the class got the point of the theme, and more did not. Madeline smiled inanely for the benefit of her neighbors, and wondered if the professor would try to pick out Georgia Ames. Apparently he had not even noticed the signature; for when he came to the end of the theme, he looked at it curiously, consulted his roll, and added the new name at the end of the list. Then, with a scathing comment upon the deadly commonplaceness of the other themes, he opened his portfolio and continued his unfinished lecture.
Madeline took notes in a leisurely fashion and wondered if it was her duty to go up at the end of the hour and claim Georgia Ames’s contribution. She had already accomplished her object, by striking a spark of enthusiasm out of the blasé Dr. Eaton; but she decided that it would be just as well to wait a little before giving her explanation. Georgia Ames might prove a valuable ally in some other time of need. Madeline lost the thread of the lecture as she considered the vast possibilities of a second self.
She brought the subject up at luncheon, without mentioning Georgia.
“She could do the things you never have time to,” she explained, “and the things you hate, or can’t do well.”
“I shouldn’t care to be your second self,” said Mary Brooks. “You’d make a perfect drudge of her,—keep her mending stockings and doing errands all her days. You might as well hire a maid.”
“That’s a good point,” admitted Madeline; “but I should take care not to abuse her. She would be a very fascinating person, I assure you. You see, not really being anybody she could do just as she pleased, without caring what people thought of her.”