CHAPTER XII
AN ORIGINAL IN MATH
When Gertrude’s brother turned up at college just before the holidays of their senior year, he boldly asked for Bea in the same breath with his sister’s name. When the message was brought to her, that fancy-free young person’s first thought was a quick dread that Berta would tease her about the preference. But no. Miss Abbott, chairman of the Annual’s editorial board, clasped her inky hands in relief.
“Bless the boy! He couldn’t have chosen better if he had looked through the walls and discovered Bea the sole student with time to burn—or to talk, for that matter. Trot along, Beatrice, and tell him that Gertrude is coming the moment she has dug her way out of this avalanche of manuscript. I can’t possibly spare her for half an hour yet. Go and distract his mind from his unnatural sister by means of another story.”
“Tell him about your little original in math, Bea,” called Lila after her, “that’s your best and latest.”
Bea retraced her steps to thrust back an injured countenance at the door. “I guess I am able to converse as well as monologue, can’t I?” she demanded indignantly, “you just listen.”
However, when confronted by a young man with a monosyllabic tongue and an embarrassingly eloquent pair of eyes, she seized a copy of the last Annual from the table in the senior parlor, and plunged into an account of her own editorial trials.
Gertrude is on the board for this year’s Annual, you know, and Berta Abbott is chairman. At this very moment they are struggling over a deluge of manuscripts submitted in their prize poem contest. Of course, I sympathize, because I have been through something of the same ordeal. The Monthly offered a prize for a short story last fall, and we had rather a lively sequel to the decision. Shall I tell you about it from the beginning? At our special meeting, I read the stories aloud, because I happen to be chief editor. Nobody said anything at first. Janet, the business editor, tipped her chair back and stared at the piles of magazines on the shelves opposite. Laura, who does the locals, pressed her forehead closer to the pane to watch the girls hurrying past on their way to the tennis tournament on the campus. Adele and Jo, the literaries, nibbled their fountain-pens.
I spread out the manuscripts, side by side, in a double row on the big sanctum desk, picked up my scribbled pad, leaned back till the swivel screw squeaked protestingly from below, and said, “Well?”
Janet brought her chair down on all four feet with a bump. “Nary one is worth a ten dollar prize,” she declared pugnaciously, “especially now that Robbie Belle has gone to the infirmary for six weeks and she can’t help me in soliciting advertisements.”