“I don’t think you ought to refer to freshmen as an empty house,” said Betty severely, “and anyhow it serves you right for all the times you have cut over.”
“When did you come?” asked Mary, apparently considering that one topic had been pursued far enough. “You haven’t done all this”—she indicated the miscellaneous results of Betty’s unpacking by a sweeping gesture—“in just this one evening?”
“Rather not,” said Betty. “Mary, I’ve been here two whole days—not in the Belden of course, because it wasn’t open, but in Harding; and I think that if you hadn’t come just when you did, I should have—cried,” ended Betty, in a sudden burst of confidence.
“You poor thing!” said Mary sympathetically. “I suppose it was a freshman cousin or something.”
Betty nodded. “Lucile Merrifield. She’s a dear, and she said she didn’t need me one bit, but her mother and my mother settled it that I was to come. And of course Lucile was busy with her exams. and I didn’t have anything to do all day but sit around and think what a lovely summer I’d been having. And that horrid woman we stayed with thought I was the freshman and asked me right before a whole tableful of them if I was homesick—just because Lucile happens to be tall and dignified, and her hair is straight.” Betty gave a vicious pull to the yellow curl that would escape from its companions and fall over her eyes.
Mary grinned sympathetically. “Too bad about your childish ringlets,” she said. “But I’ll bet your cousin isn’t a circumstance to mine—the eighth one from Wisconsin that came on for her examinations last June. Was yours the weeping kind?”
“Weeping!” repeated Betty, laughing at the idea of the stately Lucile dissolved in tears. “Not much. She was so calm and cool that I thought she must have flunked and was trying to cover it up. She had five examinations, Mary, and they might have been five afternoon teas for all she seemed to care; and she isn’t a dig or a prod, or anything of that kind, either. So I got worried and made her go all over the questions with me. As far as I could see, she did awfully well. Anyhow I don’t believe she can possibly have flunked.”
“What a good idea!” said Mary admiringly. “I’m afraid I didn’t take a serious enough view of my responsibilities last spring. But then the eighth cousin was perfectly hopeless and it was a mercy to everybody concerned that she failed. She was the kind of person that would rather risk making a bad break than leave anything out. In her English exam. they asked her what a leviathan was,—it’s mentioned in ‘Paradise Lost,’ you know,—and she said ‘a country near Thrace.’ I think myself that was her finish. It doesn’t do to be so positive unless you know you’re in the right.”
“I don’t believe it’s ever best to be positive,” said Betty sadly. “I was so positive that I wanted a single room, and now I’ve got one, and I’m missing Helen Chase Adams already.”
“Oh, you’ll like it when you’re settled,” Mary reassured her, glancing around the room. “Why do you have all the chiffonier drawers open at once?”