“She’s snippy about returning things,” said Lila, “she acts as if she didn’t care whether you do her a favor or not. I don’t like her.”
“She’s queer,” I said.
Now I had a perfect right to say that because it was true. Mary Winchester was just about the queerest girl in college. Everybody thought so. But I shall say no more at present, as her queerness is the subject of the rest of this story. If I told you immediately just how she was queer and all the rest of it, there wouldn’t be any story left, would there?
Well, as the weeks whirled past, we studied character and wrote daily themes till we were desperate. Robbie Belle grew sadder and sadder until Berta suggested that she might describe the gymnasium, the chapel, the library, the drawing rooms, the kitchen, and so forth, one by one, telling the exact size and position of everything. That filled up quite a number of days. When Miss Anglin put a little note of expostulation, so to speak, on the theme about the corridor—it was, “This is a course in English, not mathematics, if you please,”—Berta started her in on the picture gallery. There were enough paintings there to last till the end of the semester. Of course, such work did not require her to read character. Robbie Belle didn’t want to do that somehow; she said it seemed too much like gossip.
However, at first, it wasn’t gossip. For instance one day Lila and I collected smiles. We scurried around the garden and dived in and out of the hedge in order to meet as many people as possible face to face. Then we took notes on the varieties of greeting and made up themes about them. Miss Anglin marked an excellent on mine that time. For another topic we paid one-minute calls on everybody we knew. When they looked surprised and inquired why we did not sit down, we frankly explained that we were gathering material for an essay on Reading Character from the Way a Person says “Come in!”
After we had been grinding out daily themes for three weeks we began to long for something to break the monotony. My brain was just about wrung dry, and Lila said she simply loathed the sight of a sheet of blank paper. One afternoon while I was struggling over my theme, Berta threw a snowball against my window, flew up the dormitory steps, sped down the corridor, gave a double rat-tat-too on my door, and burst in without waiting for an answer.
“Listen! Quick! I have an idea. It struck me out by the hedge. Why not study manners as well as character? Why not divide——”
“Go away. That snowball plop against the pane spoiled my best sentence. This is due in forty minutes. I’ve written up my family and friends and books and pictures, my summer vacations—a sunset at a time, my little——”
“Why not divide everybody, I say——”
“——dog at home,” I continued placidly. “I’ve composed themes about the orchard, the woods, the table-fare, the climate, the kitten I never owned, the thoughts I never had. To-day I was in despair for a subject till I happened to borrow one of your cookies and——”