“They stick,” explained Betty savagely, “every blessed one of them. I’ve got them all open now except the bottom one, but it took me almost an hour, and I’m not going to risk having to do it all over again. And almost every one of the hooks in the closet is broken, so I can’t hang up my dresses; and look at the spots on that wall!”
Mary squinted near-sightedly at the black stains. “Jane Drew must have had a quarrel with one of her pictures and thrown an ink bottle at it,” she said. “I wonder how she covered up the tragedy. I never noticed those spots last year.”
“She must have had a very big picture,” said Betty. “My biggest Gibson girl won’t do it. And my desk won’t go into that corner where Jane had hers.”
“Number twenty-seven must have shrunk during the summer,” said Mary. “I hope my palatial apartment hasn’t lost any of its six by ten spaciousness.”
There was a long pause. “Mary,” began Betty at last, “are you tired or are you blue?”
“Blue,” declared Mary savagely, “blue as a heron. (Did we ever find one in the Mary-Bird-Club, Betty?) I wondered if you’d notice it. I hate being a senior. I know it’s going to be perfectly deadly—this seeing the last of things. How do you like being a junior?”
Betty hesitated. “Mary, does it always last,—the fun of college? Did you ever know a girl who’d been very, very fond of it for two years to get tired of it all of a sudden?”
“Never,” said Mary decidedly. “That’s just what the girls I used to know at home are always asking me. ‘Why do you stay on so long, Mary? Don’t you get bored?’ And when I try to explain, I suppose they think it all sounds very dull. I presume I should think so myself, if I hadn’t been here to see. One year is a good deal like the ones before it,—the same friends, only a few more each year, the same nice little stunts, and almost the same things to try for,—but somehow each one is different and there’s plenty of excitement all along the road. If you’re afraid of outgrowing it, as you would a prep. school, you needn’t be. College is too big to be outgrown. It has a new side ready for any new side that you can develop. I say, Betty.”
“Yes?” inquired Betty absently. She was wondering how Mary had guessed that she had developed some new sides during the long vacation.