“The chairs are too close together now and Cora’s place is way around at the other end. It would make too much confusion to move so many people. Here comes T. now. I shall be almost opposite Eleanor and Katherine, and I don’t mind one bit.”
So it happened that Betty Wales ate her class supper between Clara Madison and the fat Miss Austin, and enjoyed it as thoroughly as if she had been where she belonged, between Babbie and Roberta. The supper wasn’t very good—suppers for two hundred and fifty people seldom are—but the talk and the jokes, the toasts and the histories, Eleanor’s radiant face at the head of the table, the spirit of jollity and good-fellowship everywhere,—these were good enough to make up. Besides, it was the last time they would all be together. Betty hadn’t realized before how much she cared for them all—for the big indiscriminate mass of the class that she had worked and played with these four years. She had expected to miss her best friends, but now, as she looked down the long tables, she saw so many others that she should miss. Yes, she should miss them all from the fat Miss Austin who was so delighted to be sitting beside her to the serious-minded Carlotta Young, with her theories about testing your education.
Katherine was reading the freshman history, hitting off the reception, with its bewildering gaiety and its terrifying grind-book, those first horrible midyears, made even more frightful by Mary Brooks’s rumor, the basket-ball game—when that was mentioned they made T. Reed stand on her chair to be cheered, and then they cheered the rest of the team, who, as Katherine said, “had marched so gallantly to a glorious defeat.” As Christy wasn’t there, somebody read her letter, which explained that her mother was better but that the twins had come down with the measles and Christy was “standing by the ship.” So they cheered the plucky letter and then they sang to its author.
“Oh, here’s to our Christine,
We love her though unseen,
Drink her down, drink her down,
Drink her down, down, down!”
When the team was finally allowed to sit down, Katherine went on to the joys of spring-term, with its golf and tennis, its Mary-bird club and its tumultuous packing and partings. When she had finished and been applauded and sung to, and finally allowed to sit down and eat a very cold croquette, Betty looked over at Emily Davis and the next minute for no reason at all she found herself winking back the tears. She had had such a good time that year and K. had picked out just the comical little things that made you remember the others that she hadn’t mentioned.
Little Alice Waite was toasting the cast. Alice was no orator. She stammered and hesitated and made you think she was going to break down, but she always ended by saying or doing something that brought down the house.
“I think you ought to have given this toast to somebody else,” she began innocently. “I can’t act, and I can’t speak either, as it happens. Besides words speak louder than actions. No, I mean actions speak louder than words, so I will let the cast toast themselves.”
“Roast themselves, you mean,” said Katherine, pushing back her chair.
And then began a clever burlesque of the casket scene in which Gratiano played Portia’s part, Shylock was Nerissa, Gobbo Bassanio, and Jessica the Prince of Morocco. Next Alice called for the Gobbos and Portia and the Prince of Morocco “stood forth” and went through a solemn travesty of the scene between the father and son that left the class faint and speechless with laughter.
Then there were more toasts and when the coffee had been served they made the engaged girls run around the table. Betty was sorry then that she wasn’t in her own place, to help get Babbie Hildreth started. Her friends were all sure that she was engaged and she had hinted that she might tell them more about it at class-supper, but now she denied it as stoutly as ever. Finally Bob settled the question by getting up and running in her place,—a non-committal proceeding that delighted everybody.