“She has an instinct for good literature. Professor Green tells me her taste is unerring. He says it is because her preference is for the simple, and the simple is always the best. Little Otoyo has the same feeling for the best in poetry. Haven’t we missed that little Jap, though? I’ll be so glad to have her back. I fancy I shall have some tutoring to do in spite of myself to get Otoyo Sen up with her class.”
Otoyo Sen, the little Japanese girl who had played such a close part in the college life of our girls, had been back in Japan, and had not been able to reach America in time for the opening weeks of college, due to some business engagements of her father. But she was trusting to Molly and her own industry to catch up with her class, and was hurrying back to Wellington as fast as the San Francisco Limited could bring her.
Molly had been writing every moment that she could spare from her hard reading, and now she had two things she really wanted to show Professor Green—a story she had worked on for weeks until it seemed to be part of her, and a poem. She had sent the poem to a magazine and it had been rejected, accompanied by a letter which she could not understand. At all times in earlier days she had gone frankly to the professor’s study to ask him for advice, but this year she could hardly make up her mind to do it.
“He is as kind as ever to me, but somehow I can’t make up my mind to run in on him as I used to,” said Molly to herself. “I know I am a silly goose—or is it perhaps because I am so grown up? It is only five o’clock this minute, it gets dark so early in November, and I have half a mind to go now.” The temperament that goes with Molly’s coloring usually means quick action following the thought, so in a moment Molly had on her jacket and hat. “Nance, I am going to see Professor Green about some things I have been writing. I won’t be late, but don’t wait tea for me. Melissa may be in to see us, but you will take care of her, I know.”
There was a rather tired-sounding, “Come in,” at Molly’s knock on Professor Green’s study door.
“Oh, dear, now I am going to bore him!” thought the girl. “I have half a mind to run back through the passage and get out into the Cloister before he has a chance to open the door and see who was knocking. But that would be too foolish for a postgraduate! I’d better run the risk of boring him rather than have him think I am some one playing a foolish Sophomore joke, or even a timid little Freshman, afraid to call her soul her own.”
“Come in, come in. Is any one there?” called the voice rather briskly for the usually gentle professor. And before Molly could open the door it was actually jerked open. “Dearest Molly!—I mean, Miss Molly—I thought you were going to be some one else. The fact is, I have had a regular visitation from would-be poets this afternoon, and, as it never rains but it pours, I had a terrible feeling that it was another one. I am so glad to see you; not just because you are not what I feared you were, but because you are you.”
Molly blushed crimson and tried to hide the little roll of manuscript behind her, but the young man saw it and kicked himself mentally for a rash, talking idiot.
“I can’t come in, thank you. I just stopped by to—to——I just thought I’d ask you when your sister was coming.”
“Oh, Molly Brown, what a poor prevaricator you do make! You know perfectly well you have written something you want me to see; and you also know, or ought to know, that I want to see what you have written above everything; and what I said about would-be poets had nothing to do with you and me. The fact is, I am a would-be myself and have been working on a sonnet this afternoon instead of looking over the thousand themes that I must have finished before to-morrow’s lecture. I had just got the eighth line completed when you knocked, and the six others will be easy. Please come in and take off your hat, and I’ll get Mrs. Brady to make us some tea; and while the kettle is boiling you can show me what you have been doing, and when I get my other six lines to my sonnet done I’ll show it to you.”