CHAPTER IV
AN ADVENTUROUS MOUNTAIN DAY
“The 19— scholarships, providing aid to the approximate sum of one hundred dollars for each of four students, preferably members of an upper class”—thus the announcement was to appear formally in the college catalogue. The president and the donor had both heartily approved of Betty’s scheme, and the scholarships were an accomplished fact. It had been the donor’s pleasant suggestion that 19— should keep in perpetual touch with its gift to the college by appointing a committee to act with one from the faculty in disposing of the scholarships. Betty Wales was chairman, of course. 19— did not intend that she should forget her connection with those scholarships. Betty took her duties very seriously. She watched the girls at chapel, in the recitation halls, on the campus, noted those with shabby clothes and worried faces, found out their names and their boarding-places, and set tactful investigations on foot about their needs. The enormous number of her “speaking acquaintances” became a college joke.
“Bow, Betty,” Katherine would whisper, whenever on their long country walks, they met a group of girls who looked as if they might belong to the college. And then, “Is it possible I’ve found somebody you don’t know? Better look them up right away.”
“It’s splendid training for your memory,” Betty declared, and it was, and splendid training besides in helpfulness and social service, though Betty did not put it so grandly. To her it was just trying to take Dorothy King’s place, and not succeeding very well either.
In looking up strangers, Betty did not forget her friends. Nobody could be more deserving of help than Rachel Morrison. Her hard summer’s work had worn on her and made the busy round of tutoring and study seem particularly irksome. But Rachel, while she was pleased to think that she had been the joint committee’s first choice, refused the money.
“I could only take it as a loan,” she said, “and I don’t want to have a debt hanging over my head next year. I’m not so tired now as I was when I first got back, and I can rest all next summer. Did I tell you that Babbie Hildreth’s uncle has offered me a position in his school for next fall?”
Emily Davis, on the other hand, was very glad to accept a scholarship,—“As a loan of course,” she stipulated. She had practically supported herself for the whole four years at Harding, and the strain and worry had begun to tell on her. A little easier time this year would mean better fitness for the necessarily hard year of teaching that was to follow, without the interval of rest that Rachel counted upon. Emily’s mother was dead now, and her father made no effort to help his ambitious daughter. She might have had a place in the woolen mills, where he worked years before, he argued; since she had not taken it, she must look out for herself.
But with the serious side of life was mixed, for Betty and the rest, plenty of gaiety. 19— might not be greatly missed after they had gone out into the wide, wide world, but while they stayed at Harding everybody seemed bent on treating them royally.
“You know this is the last fall you’ll have here,” Polly Eastman would say, pleading with Betty to come for a drive. “There’s no such beautiful autumn foliage near Cleveland.”