Betty Wales on the campus

by Edith K. Dunton

Betty promised to do that also, and Jim departed, divided between encouragement at Betty’s cordial invitation and her promise to write, and a conviction that before he had shut the door she had forgotten his very existence in rapt absorption in her official plans and perplexities.

The housewarming was a “Madelineish” success—that was foreordained—in spite of the Mystery’s refusal to attend it, the Thorn’s loud declaration that it was an absurd idea, and the Goop’s first using part of her costume for a dusting cloth and then losing it all in the unfathomable depths under her bed. Of course it was absurd—deliciously absurd—the Thanksgiving of the Purple Indians. The Purple Indians lived in blue tents in the depths of a pink forest. Their clothes were travesties of the latest shades and modes. They were thankful for the beautiful color-scheme of their world, for the seclusion and leisure of their lives. Presently they were discovered by a band of New Women, who converted them to suffrage, dress-reform, and the pursuit of culture, and marched them off to a Female College where they could live to learn—not to eat and to dress. There were sly local hits at the doll fad, the faculty’s latest diversions, the department societies, the frivolities of Harding life in general.

With a few exceptions the Morton Hall girls entered into the affair with spirit, making friends over the rehearsals and committee meetings, displaying much executive ability, and encouraging Betty to feel that in spite of some small disappointments in the character of a few of those who had been chosen, most of the Morton Hall-ites were fine girls, well worthy the help they were receiving in such generous measure.

The Mystery fully justified her title. She was a bundle of contradictions. In spite of her curious craving for isolation, she seemed hungry for friendship and sympathy. She was painfully anxious for a part in the play and surprised Madeline by suggesting a clever little scene to be added to it; but all of a sudden she declared the scene would be too silly, refused to write it out, and was with difficulty persuaded to keep her part in the performance.

She seemed to have made no friends in her three years of college life, and she assured Betty forlornly that there was no one she cared to ask to the play. But when Betty told Binks Ames, and Binks humbly begged for an invitation, the Mystery acted frightened and embarrassed, and disappeared the minute the play was over, leaving Binks to spend the rest of the evening as best she might.

“I think she’s your kind,” Betty told Mrs. Post. “I’ll poke up the Goop and console the Thorn, if you’ll try to clear up the Mystery—and cheer her up too.”

So Esther Bond found herself repeatedly invited into Mrs. Post’s cheerful little sitting-room for tea and a good talk in the dusk of the afternoon. Often just before ten Mrs. Post would tap on the tower room door, and step in for a cheerful inquiry about “lessons” and a friendly good-night. At first the Mystery resented these intrusions as spying on her jealously guarded seclusion. She accepted Mrs. Post’s invitations sulkily because she could not well refuse, and sat, glum and silent, in the chair farthest from her hostess, as though intent on preventing all intruders from scaling her wall of reserve.

But gradually she melted. Mrs. Post was so friendly, so impervious to sulks and melancholy. It was so evident that her interest had nothing to do with curiosity—that she knew and cared nothing about the Mystery’s place in the college world. Best of all, she never referred to the Mystery’s habit of locking her door; she might never have noticed it from her unconscious manner.

One night the Mystery sat down quite close to Mrs. Post, and the feeling of intimacy that comes from sitting close together in the firelight unsealed her lips. She told Mrs. Post about her lonely childhood spent on her grandfather’s farm.

“He was awfully poor,” she explained. “The farm was mortgaged, and everything was old and forlorn and coming to pieces. Once the Humane Society officers arrested him for driving a lame horse to town. I was with him. I remember how ashamed I was. I begged him to let me go back and live with my mother. Then at last he told me that mother was dead, and that my father had treated her cruelly and had refused to take care of her ‘brats.’ I shall never forget the sting of that word. It drowned out the shame of being arrested for cruelty to animals. Well, the next year the mortgage was foreclosed and the farm sold. The shame of that killed my grandfather. My grandmother went to the poorhouse, and I went to work for a family in the village, where I could earn my board and have a chance to go to school. I used to think I’d like to teach.”