They walked slowly up the long street, Ursula chatting easily, and Marjory wondering how many of the girls they passed belonged to the college. They paused before a druggist's window, all Huyler's and violet soap, and Ursula walked by a long, shining soda fountain to a room in green and white, with little tables and a great palm in the centre. The tables were very nearly filled, and there was a cheerful clatter of tall spoons and a businesslike bustle of clerks with trays.
"This is Kingsley's," said Ursula, with a comprehensive gesture. "Will you have a chocolate ice?" While absorbing the inviting and pernicious mixture, Miss Cunningham looked about her with interest. In one corner four girls with rumpled shirt-waists and dusty golf stockings squabbled over scores, and illustrated with spoons preferred methods of driving and putting. Their voices rose above the level prescribed for drawing-room conversation, and they called each other strange names. In another corner a tall, dark girl with a grave expression talked steadily in a low voice to her companion, a clever-looking creature, whose bursts of laughter grew hysterical as the dignified one continued, with a perfectly impersonal manner, to reduce her to positive tears of mirth. To them Ursula bowed, and the narrator, politely recognizing her, went on with her remarks, to an accompaniment of gurgling protest from her friend. Near them a porcelain blonde, gowned in a wonderful pale blue stuff with a great hat covered with curly plumes, ate strawberry ices with a tailor-made person clothed in white piqué, mystic, wonderful. She was all stiffness and specklessness, and she looked with undisguised scorn at the clamoring athletes, a white leather card-case in her hand. Near one window a gypsy-faced child in a big pink sunbonnet imparted mighty confidences to her friend, who shook two magnificent auburn braids over her shoulders with every chuckle.
"And I heard a knock at the door and of course I thought it was Helen or some of the girls, and I called to come in and, my dear, who do you think it was? It was the expressman! 'Will you sign this book?' said he, and he brought the book right up to the bed and I leaned on my elbow and signed it! My dear, wasn't that perfectly—"
"Oh, well, it's awfully funny here, anyway. That beastly old laundry tore my lovely lace nightgown to shreds and it was new, and I put in an old dressing-sacque that was all in rags and I was going to throw it away, and they mended it carefully before they sent it back!"
As they left the room and Ursula waited while the clerk looked up her soda ticket, the door flew open and an impish little creature, with a large, deprecating, motherly girl in her wake, slipped into the shop.
"Now don't make for the back room, Bertie dear, for there isn't time. We've got lots of places to do yet!" she called, and catching sight of Ursula she dashed up to her.
"What do you think Alberta and I are doing? We're so bored, and we're going to stop at every drug store on this side and have an ice-cream soda, and the same going back on the other side. Isn't that interesting? I tell Alberta it's bound to be—sooner or later!"
"Is that a freshman?" Marjory inquired competently, and Ursula's eyes twinkled as she replied gravely:
"No, that's a senior. She has fits of idiocy, but in her better moments she's quite a person to know. She's in the Lawrence with me. Why on earth she should go and get Alberta May and drag her into degradation and dyspepsia, nobody knows, but she always does."
They rested for a while in Ursula's room, which was "more than enormous," as Anne said—it was intended for a double room—and furnished very delightfully. There were some beautiful Copley prints and a cast or two and a long low shelf of books and fascinating wicker chairs with puffy cushions. There was the inevitable tea-table and chafing-dish paraphernalia and the inevitable couch with a great many Yale pillows; but there were not more than a dozen photographs of girls in any one place and only one Gibson girl, and she was very small. There was a beautiful desk all littered with papers and little photographs of Ursula's family and her horse at home, and a lot of the pretty little cluttering things one picks up abroad. Marjory saw no girl with such consistently fascinating clothes as Ursula's during her visit, nor did she sit in any room so charming as hers, the college girl being a generation behind her brother in this regard; but first impressions are strong, and Ursula's silver brushes, her beautiful etching, and the two wonderful rugs that nearly covered her shining floor formed the stage setting for all Marjory's subsequent imaginary dramas.