Nance glanced at her watch.
“Wouldn’t you like to go for a stroll before supper? We have an hour yet. I’m dying to see the famous Quadrangle and the Cloisters and a few other celebrated spots I’ve heard about. Aren’t you?”
“And incidentally rub off a little of our greenness,” said Molly, recalling the words of the girl next door.
As the two girls closed the door to their room and paused on the landing, the door adjoining burst open and a human whirlwind blew out of the single room and almost knocked them over.
“I beg your pardon,” said Nance stiffly, giving the human whirlwind a long, cool, brown glance.
Molly, a little behind her friend, examined the stranger with much curiosity. She could not quite tell why she had imagined her to be a small black-eyed, black-haired person, when here stood a tall, very beautiful young woman. Her hair was light brown and perfectly straight. She had peculiarly passionate, fiery eyes of very dark gray, of the “smouldering kind,” as Nance described them later; her features were regular and her mouth so expressive of her humors that her friends could almost read her thoughts by the curve of her sensitive lips. Even in that flashing glimpse the girls could see that she was beautifully dressed in a white serge suit and a stunning hat of dull blue, trimmed with wings.
But instead of continuing her mad rush, which seemed to be her usual manner of doing things, the young woman became suddenly a zephyr of mildness and gentleness.
“Excuse my precipitate methods,” she said. “I never do things slowly, even when there’s no occasion to hurry. It’s my way, I suppose. Are you freshmen? Perhaps you’d like for me to show you around college. I’m a soph. I’m fairly familiar.”
Nance pressed her lips together. She was not in the habit of making friends off-hand. Molly, in fact, was almost her first experience in this kind of friendship. But Molly Brown, who had never consciously done a rude thing in her life, exclaimed:
“That would be awfully nice. Thanks, we’ll come.”