“I suppose so,” said the girl, struggling to keep back her tears, “but it’s a little lonesome at first.”
“Poor little souls,” thought Molly, who had overheard with much pride Judy’s eulogy of college, “how can we explain it to them? They’ll just have to find it out themselves as we did before them.”
The truth is, our new juniors felt quite motherly and old.
A hushed silence fell over the Queen’s girls when the bus drove by the grass-grown plot where once had stood their college home.
“If a dear friend had been buried there, we couldn’t have felt more solemn,” Molly wrote her sister that night.
But the prestige felt in alighting finally at the great arched entrance to the Quadrangle drove away all sad thoughts, and when they hastened down the long polished corridor to their rooms, they could not quench the pride which rose in their breasts. It was the real thing at last. Queen’s and O’Reilly’s had been great fun, but this was college. They were the true daughters of Wellington now, and that night when the gates clicked together at ten, they would sleep for the first time behind her gray stone walls.
At that moment the voices of a hundred-odd other daughters hummed through the halls, but it was all a part of the college atmosphere, as Judy said.
Their bedrooms were not quite as large as the old Queen’s rooms, but oh, the sitting room! They viewed it with pride. Each of the three had contributed something toward additional furniture. The piano was Judy’s; the divan, Nance’s; and the cushions, yet to be unpacked, Molly’s. There was another contribution not made by any of the three. It was the beautiful Botticelli photograph left for Molly by Mary Stewart, who had gone to Europe for the winter.
“How glad I am the walls are pale yellow and the woodwork white!” exclaimed Judy joyfully.
“How glad I am there’s plenty of room on these shelves for everybody’s books,” said Nance.