And yet, after she had learned to make allowances for the oversensitiveness, Bea found Lila more lovable and winning week by week. She was philosopher enough to recognize the fact that every one has the “defects of his qualities.” The very quality that sent Lila hurrying up-stairs in an agony of mortification because a senior had forgotten to bow to her, was the one that inclined her to enter into Bea’s varying moods with exquisite responsiveness. It was delightful to have a friend who was ever ready to answer gayety with gayety and sober thoughts with sympathy. Indeed, when Lila was not wrapped up in her own suffering, she could not be surpassed in the priceless gift of sympathy. For the sake of that, much might be forgiven.
Much but not everything. Just before the midyear examinations came a crisis in the growth of their friendship. One afternoon Lila reached the head of the stairs barely in time to make a sudden swerve out of Miss Merriam’s breezy path.
“Heigho, Eliza Allan,” she called in careless teasing, “why don’t you spell your name the way it is in the catalogue? More dignified, I think. By the way, I’ve been into your room and left some burned cork for your chapter play. We had more than we needed last night. By-bye.”
Lila walked on in frosty silence. By-bye, indeed! And to address her as Eliza, too, on this very afternoon when she had as much as she could bear anyhow. To hear her essay read aloud and criticised before the class, and then to have it handed to her across the desk, so that anybody could see the awful Rewrite in red ink scrawled on the outside! To be sure, all the essays had been distributed at the same time, and nobody knew for sure that hers had been the one read aloud. Still they might have seen the name on it or noticed how red and pale she turned, or something. And worse still, the examinations were coming soon, and she was sure she would fail. If it were not for leaving Bea, she would go home that night. She certainly would!
As she entered, Bea looked up brightly from the cardboard which she was cutting into squares.
“Here you are!” she exclaimed in cheery greeting, though her eyes had shadowed instantly at sight of the unhappy drooping of every line. “Sue Merriam has been in to show me how to make you up for the play next month. It takes quite an artistic touch to darken the brows and touch up the lashes. Catch these corks and put them away. They’re messing up my dinner-cards.”
Lila’s shoulders quivered as if pricked by a spur even while she mechanically caught the bits of black and fumbled them in her fingers.
“She meant that my brows are too thin and my lashes too light. I would thank her to keep her criticism until it is called for.”
For half a minute Bea kept her head down while her chest heaved over a sigh of weary anticipation. Then she turned with an affectionate query: “What has happened now, Lila? Tell me, dear.”
Upon hearing about the affair of the essay, she expostulated consolingly, “Of course that is no disgrace. She is severe with all the girls, tears their essays into strips and empties the red ink over them. She doesn’t mean it personally, you know. How can we learn anything if nobody corrects our mistakes? Anyway it was an honor to have it read aloud. Very likely the girls did not see the Rewrite. She never bothers much with the utterly hopeless papers. Come, cheer up! The red ink was a compliment.”