Berta’s repartee consisted of a sofa pillow aimed accurately at the diminishing crack.
The next day was Saturday. Bea failed to appear at breakfast—a catastrophe which had not occurred before in the memory of the oldest junior. Berta who usually arrived herself half an hour late headed a procession of inquiring friends, three of whom bore glasses of milk and plates of rolls to supply the dire omission. A succession of crescendo taps at her door was at length rewarded by a drowsy-eyed apparition in bath-robe and worsted slippers.
“Oh, thank——” she exclaimed at sight of the sympathetic group, and suddenly remembered that she must be different from her ordinary self. “I don’t want anything to eat. I didn’t feel exactly like getting up early. I seem to prefer to be alone this morning.” And she managed, though with a hand that faltered at the misdeed, to shut the door in their astonished faces.
“Well, I never!” “What has happened?” “Was it a telegram?” “How perfectly atrocious!” “Is she sick?” “Beatrice Leigh to treat us with such unutterable rudeness!”
Berta listened with a queer little smile on her sensitively cut lips. Once she noticed a hasty twist of the knob as if Bea had snatched at it from the other side under the prick of the comments floating over the transom. As she walked slowly away the smile faded before a shadowing recollection. She was wondering if her own manner had truly been so unpardonable on that autumn morning when Robbie had carried her a baked apple with cream on it and plum bread besides. It had certainly been irritating to be interrupted in the middle of that rondel for the sake of which she had skipped Sunday breakfast. She had not forgotten how amazed and disappointed Robbie had looked with the saucer in one hand, the plate in the other, while the door swung impatiently back to its place. But then, the poem was sufficient excuse for that discourtesy, Berta assured herself in anxiety to justify her behavior. If she had waited to be polite, the thought and the rhymes would doubtless have scattered beyond recall. Nobody could condemn her for slamming the door and hurrying again to her desk. She had saved the rondel, and it had been printed in the Monthly. That was worth some sacrifice, even of manners to dear old Robbie. She always understood and forgave such small transgressions of the laws of friendship. Only it certainly looked different when somebody else did it.
An hour or so later while Berta was bending devotedly over her notes in the history alcove of the library, she was vaguely aware of a newcomer sauntering carelessly behind her chair. A heavy book clattered to the floor, and somebody’s elbow in stooping to pick it up nudged her arm. Her pen went scratching in a mad zigzag across the neat page and deposited a big tear of red ink where it suddenly stopped.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” exclaimed Bea repentantly, for she was indeed the culprit; “it’s horrid to be heedless on purpose. I didn’t know it would really do any harm.”
Berta glanced up quickly from her blotter. So Bea considered a reckless disregard for books and persons also a quality of genius. Berta felt a slow blush creeping up to her brow at the candid memory of her tendency to bump into things and brush against people when in a dreamy mood—and to pass on without even a beg pardon.
“You’re evidently new to the business, my cautious and calculating young friend,” she whispered, “you should have ignored the resultant calamity. Ah—why, child!” she stared in surprise, “your collar is pinned crooked and your turnover is flying loose at one end, and your hair is coming down. You look scandalous.”
Bea looked triumphant also. “It’s an artistic disarray,” she explained. “It’s hard work because I’ve slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn’t give the same effect as yours. Does yours feel loose and straggly?”