“Queers herself?” echoed Robbie Belle, “how does a person queer herself?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She paused to reflect. “She does outlandish things. And still it isn’t what she does so much as what she is. Her acts express her character. If her character is queer, she behaves queerly, and the others fight shy of her. After all, I dare say she does find her own level, and there is nobody else there. So she goes along solitary through the four years.”
Robbie Belle looked frightened. “I wish I knew what things are queer,” she said.
“Oh, being different from the other girls, for instance, awfully different, so different that everybody notices it. Not just original, you know, but actually queer. Watch the girls, particularly those who always go around alone, and you’ll learn. Good-night, Miss Sanders. I must congratulate you again on the honor of being appointed freshman warden. Good-night.”
Robbie Belle walked slowly down the corridor to her room. “I wonder if I am queer,” she thought. “I am almost always alone.” She halted before a door that displayed a small square of white paper pinned in the middle of its upper half. Robbie Belle, her hand on the knob, regarded the sign hopelessly. “If you have a roommate who never takes down her Engaged, and she doesn’t like company and she won’t go anywhere with you herself, maybe you can’t help being queer.”
Robbie Belle entered softly. It was a large room and seemed quite bare because of the absence of curtains, rugs, and cushions. The unsociable roommate was sitting beside the centre table, her elbows propped on its shiny surface that was innocent of any cover and ignorant of the duster. A green shade over her eyes connected a blur of nondescript hair with a rather long nose beneath which a pair of pale lips in the glow of the drop-light was rapidly gabbling over some lines in Greek scansion.
Without looking up, she waved one hand forbiddingly; and Robbie Belle obediently shut her mouth over the few words that were ready to be uttered in greeting. She stood waiting in her tracks, so to speak, until the final hexameter had wailed out its drawling length, and Miss Cutter pushed back the green shade.
“Well,” she demanded, “what was the important business before the meeting? I could not spare valuable time for self-government foolishness to-night.”
“They appointed corridor wardens,” answered Robbie Belle.
“Oh, indeed! It is certainly time, I must say. In theory it is all very well to make the rules a matter of honor, but when you happen to live in a nest of girls who behave as if they were six years old, I insist that something more forcible than chapel admonitions is required. Who is the warden for this neighborhood?”