“Weren’t you going to stay anyway?” asked Helen Adams.
“Being a resident of the remote village of Kankakee, Illinois, and not having been urged to visit any of my Eastern friends, I was,” admitted Katherine, solemnly, “but that doesn’t make it any the nicer to have to work all day Saturday.”
The skating did last, and the man at the rink, being taken in hand by the B’s, sympathized heartily with their wrongs, and promised them a three days’ ice carnival, which meant search-lights, bonfires and a big band on the ice every evening. There is nothing in the world more exhilarating than skating to good music. The rink was thronged with Harding girls and Winsted men, and the proprietor could not easily regard himself as a bona fide philanthropist.
The paper-chase, to get up an appetite on Thanksgiving morning, was Katherine Kittredge’s idea and the basket-ball game in the afternoon between the Thanksgiving Dinners and the Training Tables was too fantastic to have originated with any one but Madeline Ayres.
Georgia Ames, dressed as a huge turkey gobbler, captained the Thanksgiving Dinners, who were gotten up as bunches of celery and mounds of cranberry jelly. The captain of the Training Table simulated a big bottle labeled “Pure Spring Water,” and the members of her team were tastefully trimmed with slices of dry bread. Being somewhat less spectacular than their rivals, they were a little more agile and they won the game, which was so funny that it sent two of the faculty into hysterics.
“And that’s almost as bad as indigestion,” said Babe, who was a bunch of celery. At least she had been one until she came into collision with the water bottle and lost most of her trimmings.
It was really the Thanksgiving game that precipitated the plans for the senior entertainment for the library fund. The fire the year before had not only damaged the library considerably, but it had brought its shortcomings and the absurdly small number of its volumes, compared with the rapidly increasing number of the girls who used them, to the attention of the public. Somebody had offered fifty thousand dollars for a library fund provided the college raised an equal amount. The alumnæ were trying to get the money, and because they had helped the undergraduates with their beloved Students’ Building, they wanted the undergraduates to help them now.
On the very evening of the game Marie Howard, the senior president, caught Madeline on the way to Babbie’s spread and laid the matter before her.
“The alums want us to subscribe to the fund,” she explained, “and then they think each class ought to give an entertainment. Not a bit nervy, are they? Well, of course 19— has got to take the lead, and I’ve fairly racked my brains to think what we can do. Now it’s no trouble to you to have lovely, comical ideas, and if you’ll only help me out with this entertainment, I’ll be your friend for life.”
“Why don’t you appoint a committee to take charge of it?” inquired Madeline, serenely.