Then he bowed and left them, and Ruth looked at Julia, and the latter, understanding the question that Ruth would ask, replied, “Of course I’ll help you;” while Ruth, whose Latin was weaker than Julia’s, responded, “You always were a dear.”
Julia and Ruth had arranged to board in the same house, having separate bedrooms, but sharing a large study. This was a square, corner room, with three windows. One looked down on a bit of old-fashioned garden, and the other two gave a view of some of the stately houses on Brattle Street. Their landlady, or hostess, as she liked to be called, was the widow of a Harvard instructor, who, besides a widow and two children, had left a slim little book on the Greek accusative. Mrs. Colton always had the book in plain sight on her library table, and she believed that had her husband lived he would have been one of the most distinguished of the faculty. She had long refused to open her house to Annex, or Radcliffe, students. Like many other conservative people, she did not approve of the presence of women students in Cambridge, and she did not care to encourage the new woman’s college by taking its students to board. But when the new Harvard dormitories made it harder for her to get the right kind of students to take her rooms, she began to think about the possibilities of Radcliffe. When she happened to hear that Mrs. Robert Barlow was looking for a home for her niece, she immediately sent word that she would be very glad to have her consider her rooms. She saw that it would give her house prestige to have Julia and Ruth her first Radcliffe boarders. Mrs. Barlow and the girls were well pleased with the rooms, especially as Mrs. Colton was to take no other boarders.
Ruth and Julia would hardly have been girls, however, had they been perfectly satisfied with the arrangement of the furniture as planned by Mrs. Colton and Mrs. Barlow. With the exception of a few pictures, the study was supposed to be in perfect order on that first Thursday of the term. But Julia, when they went upstairs after luncheon, decided that the divan must be moved from the windows to the corner opposite the fireplace, and Ruth suggested that the library table should go from the centre to a recess near the mantle-piece. Chairs ranged stiffly against the wall they pulled out into more inviting positions, and moved many other things. They both agreed that several pictures must be rehung, and Ruth began to jump about from mantle-piece to table to make the changes.
“Oh, do be careful!” cried Julia, as Ruth stepped from a chair to the table, with a framed Braun photograph under her arm, and a half-dozen picture nails in her hand. “Do wait,” she added, “until we can find some one.”
“Wait for whom? We can’t call the chambermaid, and Mrs. Colton would be of no more use than—well, than you, Julia. Besides, I’ve hung more pictures than you could count; and—why, what’s that?” she concluded, as a very loud knocking at the door sounded through the rooms. Forgetting the picture under her arm, as she turned she let it fall with a crash to the floor.
“Gracious!” cried Master Percival Colton, astonished at the sight of one Radcliffe girl standing on a narrow mantle-piece with another sitting on the floor picking up fragments of broken glass.
“I hope nothing’s hurt,” said Percival politely, though hardly concealing his curiosity as he handed Julia two letters. Then he turned away rather sadly, as the girls neither explained what had happened nor what they intended to do about it.
“Come down, Ruth,” cried Julia, as Percy disappeared. “Clarissa Herter, that Kansas girl, has sent her card with these letters that she found on the bulletin board. She thought that we might like to have them. Oh, they’re invitations!” she added, as she opened her envelope.
“The Senior, Junior, and Sophomore classes at home in the Auditorium, Saturday, September 30. 4 to 6.”
“Our first college invitation, and from the upper classes, too! Well, it’s evident that they don’t intend to haze us.”