“Oh, so do I; with that neat little figure, and those melancholy gray eyes, she is my very idea of a Puritan maiden. You are something like one yourself,” she concluded, “and I hope that you’ll let me call on you occasionally.”
“Why, of course, and I will call on you, too, if I may.”
Thus with the feeling that each had made a friend, the two Freshmen parted, both looking forward with interest to the college year.
Julia went to Rockley that same Tuesday afternoon, and was warmly welcomed by Brenda at the station. The younger girl, it is true, teased her cousin about being a Freshman, yet at the same time she showed so much affection, despite her teasing, that she hardly seemed the same Brenda who not long before had found in every act of Julia’s some cause for dissatisfaction.
Rockley was the summer place of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Barlow, the uncle and aunt with whom, for two years, Julia Bourne had made her home. It was on the seashore, little more than twenty miles from Boston, and Julia had passed two happy vacations there. She had gone to live with her uncle and aunt soon after her father’s death, and had completed her preparation for college at Miss Crawdon’s school, the same school that Brenda and her intimate friends attended. Brenda, Edith, Nora, and Belle were inseparables, while Julia had been more intimate with Ruth Roberts, the Roxbury girl who was now her room-mate at Cambridge.
The Barlows were to stay at Rockley until late October, and Mrs. Barlow regretted that Julia must spend that beautiful autumn month in Cambridge. She remarked at dinner that Julia looked pale, and said that she and Brenda had decided that this resulted from examinations.
“Why, you can’t imagine how weak I feel,” Brenda had added, “after an examination. You know that Miss Crawdon makes us have them, though few of us are going to college.”
“It pleases me,” Mr. Barlow had interposed, “that you and your friends should get even this indirect advantage from Radcliffe. In time the average private schoolgirl may have an equal chance with boys.”
“Why, papa, you never have wished me to go to college.”
“No, my dear, but I often have thought that you suffered at school—”