"But I should take sophomore gym and you'd be with the freshmen," objected Helen.
"Why don't you take freshman gym too? You can't do the exercises any too well, can you?"
"No," admitted Helen, frankly. "I cut a lot last year, and I couldn't do them anyway."
"Don't you hate to struggle along when you're not ready to go?" asked the girl from Bohemia.
Helen agreed that she did, and a moment later they were comparing schedules and deciding upon a class which they could both join. It came directly in the middle of the afternoon, and Helen Adams had always considered gym at any hour a flagrant waste of time; but she did not say so. There had been something in Madeline's outspoken reference to her awkward carriage that, without hurting her, had struck home. Helen Chase Adams aspired to literary honors at Harding; to this desire was suddenly added a violent ambition to be what Madeline had termed "a marvel of grace."
Betty was amazed, when she came in a little later, to find Helen trying on her gym suit.
"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded. "Gym doesn't begin for two weeks yet."
"I know it," said Helen, "but the neck of my suit never was right. It's awfully unbecoming. How would you fix it?"
"You frivolous thing!" laughed Betty, squinting at the unbecoming neck for a moment. "It's too high behind, that's all. Rip off the collar and I'll cut it down. And I have an extra blue tie that you can have—it needs a tie. But I thought you'd manage to get an excuse from gym, when you hate it so."
"Perhaps I shan't hate it this year," ventured Helen, and neither then nor later did Betty exactly understand her roommate's sudden devotion to parallel bars, ropes, the running track, and breathing exercises. But in time she did thoroughly appreciate the results of this physical training. Helen Chase Adams was never exactly "a marvel of grace"; but she was erect and supple, with considerable poise and dignity of bearing, when she left Harding.