A week passed and Margaret Selover had received a letter, supposedly from the elderly Mr. Davis, bidding her start on her westward journey Friday, the 25th.
Barbara Blair Wente, fluffy, golden and petite, sat curled up on the window seat of the room they had shared together for the past year looking the picture of misery.
“I hate him! Hate him!” Margaret was saying as she thumped a small pillow preparatory to packing it in her trunk. Then she added, rising and looking her defiance, “but he won’t keep me long, Babs. You may be sure of that. I’ll make life so unpleasant for my hoary guardian that he will soon be glad to release me. Oh dear, how I do wish that I were older so that I might begin earning my own living, but just wait until I’m eighteen. Then I will do something. Other girls do and I believe I am normally clever.”
“Who do you suppose is to meet you in Chicago?” Barbara inquired.
“Don’t know and don’t care,” was the somewhat muffled reply from the trunk, the cover of which was closed a moment later with a snap. Then Margaret sat upon it as she remarked:—“My guardian kindly informed me that I need have nothing whatever to say to my escort if I did not wish to be friendly, but that, at least, I must allow him to look out for my welfare.”
Babs sat up and looked interested. “Margaret, what if it should be a real cow-boy like the ones we have seen in the moving pictures. Those handsome young giants who are always helping damsels in distress. Wouldn’t that be romantic? I’m just wild to see a live cow-boy myself. They are fascinating on the screen.”
“Well, they don’t appeal to me,” Margaret replied, “I prefer boys who are dressed in civilized clothes and who know how to talk. All of the cow-boys in fiction use the queerest kind of a language.”
Four bells pealed through the corridors and Barbara rose reluctantly.
“Even if my heart is nearly broken over your departure, Megsy, I suppose I’ll have to go down to this old recitation,” she said.
Margaret also rose and going to the window, she looked out at the bleak orchard. “I’m not going. What’s the use of working out problems in geometry today when tomorrow I will be gone?”