“To hear you talk one might think you were a tabooed character.” Muriel’s gurgle of laughter brought a smile to Marjorie’s troubled features.
“I feel so cross sometimes when I think about that aggravating girl.” Marjorie’s answer rang with vexation. “I’ve not been in your room since you came back to Hamilton. Neither has Ronny, Jerry nor Lucy. She snubbed the four of us thoroughly in the beginning. Now proper pride won’t allow us to put ourselves in direct line for further snubs. She’s been fairly nice to Robin. Yet Robin hasn’t cared to try calling on Miss Monroe yet. She doesn’t wish to risk a snubbing, now that she’s made a little headway with our enchanted princess.”
“I could like her if she’d let me,” Muriel said bluntly. “We don’t meet often in the room except just before old ten-thirty, and in the morning. We’re both out a good deal. She is brilliant or she couldn’t cut study the way she does and not be conditioned.” There was a hint of admiration in Muriel’s observation.
“Oh-h!” Marjorie swung round in her chair until she was facing Muriel. “Why couldn’t—I wonder if you—It doesn’t seem fair to ask you, Muriel, but, since both the dorms have gone back on you, would you care to ask Miss Monroe to go home with you for Christmas?”
Marjorie fairly held her breath as she finished asking the question. This splendid way of helping the strange, beautiful girl in whom she had become so thoroughly interested she was inclined to regard as a positive dispensation of a kindly Providence.
“I might.” Muriel stared contemplatively at the anxious questioner. “I was so disappointed when my two dorms flivvered and renounced me I never thought of my old friend the Ice Queen.” She looked rather sheepish then smirked at Marjorie and said: “‘Charity begins at home.’ If I mentioned Charity in my invitation to the Ice Queen, br-r-r, she’d freeze Matchless Muriel solid at one glance. Then I couldn’t go home for Christmas. Neither could she go with me. Think how sad it would be! Two cold, shiny, slippery, glittery Ice Queens, friz solid over the holidays.”
Giggling at her own weird fancy, Muriel rose and began gathering up her packages. “I’ll ask her directly, if she’s home, dear Bean. I’ll let you know as soon as I can escape from her royal presence to tell you.”
“You’re a darling, and the most obliging person in the universe. If you’d said you’d rather not ask her, I shouldn’t have blamed you in the least. I thought, after the idea popped into my head, that I ought to ask you for Miss Monroe’s sake,” was Marjorie’s honest avowal. “Let me give you a basket to put your stuff in. Here’s the laundry basket.”
Marjorie proceeded to stack the piles of clean laundry on the couch and place Muriel’s packages in the basket instead. The two girls performed the little task with the usual amount of light talk and laughter. After Muriel had gone Marjorie sat down again at the table to indulge in a kindly little daydream which had to do with helping Muriel entertain Doris Monroe should she become Muriel’s Christmas guest.
Jerry presently drifted into the room to announce that Ronny had cruelly refused to unpack the box from California before her and Lucy. “She made us help her upstairs with it, then she coldly turned us out.” Jerry complained plaintively. “I’d have raged like a gale at such treatment only she gave me some Mexican candied fruit. It was very celostrous. My new adjective just describes the candied banana I had. What became of Matchless Muriel? I see she’s beaten it.”