"Oh, hello! Have a good time?"
"Grand! Did you?"
"Perfectly fine—I saw Ursula and Dodo and—Oh, Ursula! hello! Here I am!"
"Why, Peggy Putney, you dear old thing! When did you come? They say you're in the Hatfield—how did you get there?"
"Two ahead of me and they dropped out. Miss Roberts only just told me—"
Theodora had felt very lonesome and homesick just then—everybody but herself knew so many people! And then Virginia had happened along and jostled her and begged pardon, and they had fallen into a conversation on the relative merits of the Dewey and the Hatfield. Later they had studied Livy together and confided their difficulties to each other. Virginia's mother was a Unitarian and her father was an Ethical Culturist, and her room-mate was a High Church Episcopalian and never ate meat in Lent! She thought Virginia would very probably be damned, if not in the next life, certainly in this, and she intimated as much. Virginia thought it was very hard to live with somebody who disapproved of you so much.
Theodora had been brought up to be a neat, self-helpful little person, and her room-mate, Edith Bliss, had never even seen her bed made up and left her clothes in piles on the floor just as she stepped out of them. She was horribly homesick and wept quarts every Sunday afternoon, and confided to Theodora in moments of hysterical relaxation that she thought every girl owed it to herself to have soup and black coffee for dinner and that she was going to wire Papa to take her home immediately. Theo looked at her now, eagerly devouring a doubtful lobster concoction and openly congratulating herself on the olives at her left. She was fond of Frankfurters now, was Edith, and had recently alarmed the authorities by her ingenuous scheme for annexing a night-lunch cart and keeping it on the campus: it would have been so nice, she said regretfully, to slip out and get a Frankfurter between hours!
How pretty the Gym looked! The juniors had decorated it as well as they could at odd minutes, and they had lingered in a bunch as the class came in to lean over the balcony and sing to them.
Theodora remembered how the Gym had looked the night of the sophomore reception: all light and music and girls and a wonder of excitement. She had never had an evening dress before, and her little square-necked organdie had been dearer to her than any other gown before or since. They played Rastus on Parade, and she had such nice partners and some of the girls were so lovely and had such white, beautiful shoulders—they seemed to count evening dress but a slight and ordinary thing. By junior year house-dances are wont to pall, and seniors have been known to make rabbits and read Kipling in preference; even among the freshmen Theodora had found some disillusioned souls who lamented the absence of men and found the sophomore reception slow!
Across the table an odd, distinguished-looking girl, with a clever face and dark, short-sighted eyes, smiled at her, and Theo's thoughts flashed back to that great day when she first really loved the class—the day of the Big Game. What a funny, snub-nosed little nobody Marietta Hinks had been then! But how she played! How she dodged and doubled and bounced the ball, and how they cheered her!