Oh, here's to Marietta,
For we shall not soon forget her—
Well, well, how they had grown up! Now she was "Miss Root" to the little, dark-eyed girl in the back seat in chapel, who smiled so shyly at her when the seniors led out down the middle aisle. Theo was wearing her roses to-night, and as she scratched off a little note to thank her she had seemed to see herself, another little dark-eyed girl, sending anonymous roses to Ursula Wyckoff. Dear me! would anybody ever again combine such graces of mind and body as that ornament of Ninety-purple? She had gone on wheel-rides with Theo, and once she had asked her over to wait on the juniors at a spread—Theo had sat up and got her light reported in order to write home about it.
There are those, I understand, who disapprove strongly of this attitude of Theodora's happy year: dogmatic young women who have not learned much about life and soured, middle-aged women who have forgotten. I am told that they would consider Theodora's adoration morbid and use long words about her—long words about a freshman! I have always been sorry for these unfortunate people: their chances for reconstructing Human Nature seem to me so relatively slight.
When Theo had gone home that summer with hands almost as well cared for as Ursula's, sleek, gathered-in locks, and a gratifying hold on the irregular verbs (Ursula spoke beautiful French), her mother had whimsically inquired if Miss Wyckoff could not be induced to remain in Northampton indefinitely and continue her unscheduled courses! But perhaps she was a morbid mother.
Her mother! The plates and flowers swam before Theodora's misted eyes, and the sight of Virginia—so kind that year—brought back somehow those waves of desolation that would come over her again and again, in lecture rooms, in her own dear room, at meals—all that clouded sophomore year. It was just as her good fortune came through the mail to her—a room in the Nicest House—that her mother died, and rooms mattered little to Theo, then. There were kindly aunts and other children, and she was not needed at home; so it seemed best to go on, and she had come up the steps of the Nicest House, a little black-dressed figure, and into the arms of the Nicest Woman.
It seemed to her that there was never a room so cheerful, nor pictures so lovely, nor a fire so red, nor tea and bread and butter so good, nor a smile so comfortable as the Nicest Woman's. Mademoiselle and Fräulein and Miss Roberts were sweet and kind, and the girls did all they could, but it was to the Nicest Woman that one came when conditions and warnings were in the air or one's head ached or one had eaten too much fudge or been annoyed by somebody's banjo practice. When the seniors of the Nicest House were eating and laughing there at night, it was a gay room—the Nicest Woman's; but it was very dim and quiet in the dusk, when Theodora slipped in by herself with reddened lids, and sat on the couch, and they talked of things that started to be sad but somehow always turned out cheerful; for when it was about the children and Will at Yale little jokes were sure to come up, and when Theo wondered if perhaps she hadn't been careless about writing home, and if Mother had gotten more letters in the spring, maybe—the conversation always changed, and she found herself feeling so glad and thankful that she'd gone right home in June and not visited at Virginia's.
Virginia had gone into Phi Kappa that winter, and Theo had been so proud of her. She was in the first five, and as she really hadn't expected it at all it was quite exciting. Adelaide Carew went in too, and though she went about with the seniors a great deal and called most of her class "Miss," she was much more generally liked than in her freshman year, and Virginia had got to know her better and better. Through her Theo had seen more of Adelaide, and she had been amazed to find out how really kind-hearted and human she was beneath her unapproachable ways.
But then, you never could tell—girls were so queer! Only last night, when they were walking about under the lanterns after the concert, she and Virginia and Adelaide, with two of the junior ushers, and the juniors, sophisticated young people, had cynically suggested that perhaps they'd better take themselves away in order that the three might seek out their Ivy and bedew it with their final tears, Adelaide had coughed a little huskily and suggested that perhaps when they'd planted their own Ivy they wouldn't be feeling so gay! They had stared at her blankly, hesitated, decided that coming from such a source it must have been an extraordinarily acute sarcasm, and gone away giggling, leaving Theo to wonder and Adelaide to flush and talk very hard about Bar Harbor and the comfort of a big room all to yourself once more.
Such a strange room-mate as Theo had had that year—she seemed fated to room with girls who had never made up their beds. This one had lived freshman year with friends in the town, and had had everything done for her, and when Theo asked her one day if campus life was wearing on her, she had turned two stormy gray eyes on her and burst out, "Oh, no, Theodora, but I am so deadly tired of picking up my night-gown every single morning, I think I shall die!"