Betty laughed. "I know," she said, "but I don't believe I can explain. You seem too much at home, and too sure of yourself somehow. Now, are you a freshman?"
The stranger laughed in her turn. "Technically, yes," she said, "really, no. This is my first year here, but I've passed up all the French and Spanish and Italian that the institution offers, and some of the German. I think myself that I ought to rank as a graduate student, but it seems there are some little preliminaries in the way of Math, and Latin and Logic that I have to take before I can have my sheepskin, and there's also some history and some English literature which the family demand that I take. So I don't know just how long I may hang on here."
"How—how funny!" gasped Betty. "Where do you live?"
"Bohemia, New York," answered the new girl promptly.
Betty looked puzzled.
"Why, you see," explained her mysterious friend, "it's no use saying one lives in New York. Everybody—all sorts and conditions of people—live in New York. So I always add Bohemia."
"Bohemia?" repeated Betty helplessly.
"Yes, Bohemia—the artistic New York. We have a studio and some other rooms up at the top of one of those queer old houses on Washington Square—you know it,—funny, ramshackle old place. Father has afternoons, and mother and I feed the lions and the lesser animals with tea and strawberry jam. It's very good fun, living in Bohemia."
"And how did you learn so many languages?"
"Oh, a little from tutors, but mostly from living abroad. We're not in Bohemia, New York, very much. We have a villa near Sorrento—awfully out- at-elbows, but still a villa; and we've been in Spain a good deal, and once father illustrated a book on Vienna—that was where I learned my German. Let me see—oh, it's French that I haven't accounted for. Well, we have some French relatives. They love to have us visit them at their funny old chateau, because mother mends their moth-eaten tapestries beautifully, and father paints the family portraits."