"Let's see it," demanded Betty, reaching for the paper at the top of the pile on Madeline's desk.
"That's next week's," said Madeline. "I thought I'd do them both while I was at it. But this week's is funnier."
"This week's" proved to be an absurd incident founded upon the illegibility of Henry Ward Beecher's handwriting. It was cleverly told, but the cream of its humor lay in the fact that Madeline's writing, if not so bad as Mr. Beecher's, was certainly bad enough.
"Maybe Miss Raymond can make out what he really wrote, but I've forgotten now, and I can't," said Madeline, tossing the theme back on the pile. "And I didn't try to write badly either. It just happened."
Everything "just happened" with Madeline Ayres. Betty had said that things fell into place for her, and people seemed to have a good deal the same pleasant tendency. But if they did not, Madeline seldom exerted herself to make them do her bidding. She admired hard work, and did a good deal of it by fits and starts. But she detested wire-pulling, and took an instant dislike to Eleanor Watson because some injudicious person told her that Eleanor had said she was sure to be popular and prominent at Harding.
"What nonsense!" she said, with a flash of scorn in her slumberous hazel eyes. "How it spoils life to count up the chances like that! How it takes the fun out of everything! The right way is to go ahead and enjoy yourself, and work your prettiest, and take things when they come. They always come—if you give them a little time," she added with a return of her usual serenity.
So it was wholly a matter of chance that Madeline Ayres should have succeeded in turning Helen Chase Adams into an athlete. Helen had come to college with several very definite theories about life, most of which had been shattered at the start. She had promptly revised her idea of a college in conformity with what she found—and loved—at Harding. She had decided, with some reluctance, that she had been mistaken in supposing that all pretty girls were stupid. But she still believed that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains—laying no very stringent emphasis on the "infinite"; and she was determined to prove the truth of that bold, if somewhat elusive, assertion, at least to the extent of showing that she, Helen Chase Adams, could make a thoroughgoing success of her college course.
Success may mean anything. To Helen Adams it had meant, ever since the day of the sophomore-freshman basket-ball game, the ability to write something that would interest her classmates. It might be a song that they would care to sing, or a little verse or a story that Miss Raymond would read in her theme class, as she had Mary Brooks's version of the Chapin house freshmen's letters home, and that the girls would listen to and laugh over, and later discuss and compliment her upon. It was not that she wanted the compliments, but they would measure her success.
Helen admired the girl from Bohemia because she could write—Betty had told her about the Henry Ward Beecher theme,—also because she was quick and keen, seldom hurried or worried out of her habitual serenity, and finally because Betty admired her. Madeline Ayres, for her part, thought of Helen chiefly as Betty's roommate, noticed the awkward little forward tilt of her head just as she had noticed the inharmonious arrangement of Betty's green vase, and commented upon the one in exactly the same spirit that she had called attention to the other.
"You ought to go in for gym," she said one afternoon when she had strolled into Betty's room and found only Helen. "It would straighten you up, and make you look like a different person. I'm going in for it myself, hard. I'm hoping that it will cure my slouchy walk, and turn me out 'a marvel of grace and beauty,' as the physical culture advertisements always say. Let's be in the same class, so that we can practice things together at home."