They went out to the links by trolley, through the long quiet street, past pretty lawns and pleasant houses, into the real country of fields and scattered cottages. Marjory learned how "the crowd" had vacationed together more than once; how they were going up to Carol Sawyer's place in Maine next summer for "the time of their lives"; how, after their Commencement obsequies, they were going for two weeks to Nan at Sconset and live in a house all by themselves, and then four of them were going abroad together with Nan's father—"the dearest thing in the world"; how Caroline was going to study medicine in Germany and Lucilla Bradford was going to be married and continue to illumine Boston, and Ursula and her sister were going to stay indefinitely in France or Italy with various relatives.
They seemed to have a very intimate knowledge of one another's affairs, Marjory decided, as they got out at the links and strolled up to the tiny club-house. A straggling crowd was gradually melting away there: hot, dishevelled girls with heavy bags, cool and fluffy girls with tea-cups, men arguing in white flannels and men conversing in frock coats. Important small boys—professors' sons and their friends from the town—caddied for the great man and his followers, patronizing the urchins who ordinarily amassed wealth from this employment, and a crowd of interested golfers from the town trailed about the holes, admiring, criticising, and chattering. Here and there a crimson coat shone out, some of the ladies tilted gay parasols, white duck dotted the grass everywhere. It was all very jolly and interesting, and when Nan came up with a white-flannelled youth and a cheerful if exhausted friend whom she introduced as "one of my little mates—Caroline Wilde," Marjory could have thought, as she sipped her tea and learned the score, that she was back on the links at home.
Caroline had learned much and Nan had held a reverent conversation with the champion and was basking in the recollection of it. Marjory met an ardent golfer in marvellous stockings, who was with difficulty restrained from illustrating, by means of his empty cup and the parasol his fellow-professor was guarding, the very latest method of effecting a tremendous drive from a bad spot in the course, and his friend turned out to be a classmate of her brother's; and so they started from Yale, which is a very good conversational starting-point, and their reminiscences attracted Ursula, who, with an adoring little freshman—Ursula was never without a freshman—and the Church and the Law wrangling pleasantly over a lost ball, was holding her court in a near corner. They drifted up, and the Church and the Law were so amusing and well set up that Marjory quite lost her heart to them and wished they would come "West," as they persisted in calling Chicago, remarking confidentially that nothing seemed to upset a person from Chicago so much as that!
They rode home with the Church and the Law, while the assistant in that great undertaking, the higher education of women, raced the trolley on a Columbia Chainless, to the wild delight of the passengers, who cheered his futile efforts and bribed the motorman to an exciting rate of speed.
"Do you have lessons with him, really?" Marjory demanded, as they left the rapidly churning golf stockings behind for the moment. Nan grinned. "Do you, Ursula?" she repeated. Ursula sighed but said nothing, and Nan explained that in the midst of his artless prattle last week he had mentioned a written lesson in the near future, based upon certain reference reading. "It comes off to-morrow," she added cheerfully, "and the young Lucilla is hastily sprinting through the volumes and gathering information. She sought the seclusion that a cabin grants last night, and when I howled at her through the keyhole that we were going to Boyden's for the evening meal, she said that if she got through two hundred pages and her notes by then she'd be along. Ursula does it bit by bit, and then tells us to go to the ant, thou sluggard, but little Lucy thinks she knows him better than we do, and she said he wouldn't do it. I told her, go to, he would; I saw it in his eye. So Caroline started to fill her fountain pen—she calls it that from force of habit—but what she really does is to fill the room, and what drips over—"
"There's Lucilla!" said somebody, and they got off the car and teased Lucilla—a small, tired person with a prim little face and beautiful manners—all the way down to Boyden's. A striking, sulky-looking girl with a stylish golf suit that made her look like the costumers' plates of tailor-made athletic maidens, was holding a table for them, and she turned out to be Carol Sawyer. She was the first girl of "the crowd" Marjory did not like. Her voice was loud and her manner a little overbearing; she wore too many rings and her attitude toward the college was very different from the harmless nonsense that in the case of the other girls covered plenty of good work and a real interest in it. She was evidently very wealthy, and Marjory caught herself wondering if that was why the others put up with her. When they had half finished their supper—and a very good little supper it was—a large girl, almost too tall for a girl, in a mussy short skirt and badly fitting shirt-waist sauntered into the room. From their own table and most of the others a chorus of welcome went up.
"Hello, Teddy!" "Don't hurry, Dody!" "Come over here, Dodo!" "Theodora, dear child, your side-comb is nearly out!" "Have some berries, Ted?"
She included them all in a cheerful "Hello!" and strolled up to Nan's table. "This is little Theodora Bent," said Nan, kindly. "She is very shy and unused to company, but her heart—"
"Her heart," little Theodora interrupted, dragging a chair from somewhere and quietly appropriating Ursula's creamed chicken, "is not here. It is with our friend, Mrs. Austin, who sits at a lonely table wondering where her loved ones are to-night. I met her at the door. 'Dorothea,' said she—and why she persists in calling me Dorothea we shall know, perhaps, when the mists have cleared away—'Dorothea, there is hardly a Friday night that you girls are in to supper. I'm sure I can't see why!' I said that it was strange, but it just happened so. Then she insisted on knowing why; so I suggested that perhaps you found the noise in the dining-room trying—"
"Dodo! you didn't!"