Otoyo Sen was safely sailing under Molly’s tutelage through her senior year. She spoke the most correct and precise English unless she was embarrassed or upset in some way, and then, like Melissa Hathaway, she spoke from the heart, and little Otoyo’s heart seemed to beat in adverbs and participles. She and Melissa had struck up the closest friendship.
“We might have known they would,” said the analytical Nance. “They are strangely alike to be so different.”
“Now, Nance, how Bostonesque we are becoming! I have never asked a Bostonian a question that I have not been answered in this way, ‘It is and it isn’t,’” teased Molly.
“Well, they are alike in being foreign, for Melissa is as foreign from us as is Otoyo. Then they are both scrupulously courteous until their amour propre is stepped on, and then you realize that they are both medieval. They are certainly alike in pride and in fortitude and perseverance and family feeling. You know perfectly well that the real Melissa that is so covered up by this educated Melissa would take a gun and shoot every living Sydney she could get at if her grandmother told her to! I hope to goodness modernism will never get to the old woman and she will learn that women can do anything men can, or she will make Melissa take the place of the sons she mourns. On the other hand, little Otoyo would commit hara-kiri without winking an eyelash if honorable-father told her to.”
“You have so convinced me of their similarity that I see no room for difference. They will look to me exactly like twins after this,” laughed Molly; and both the girls could hardly restrain their merriment, for at that moment the so-called twins came in to call: Melissa, tall and stately as “the lonesome pine,” with all doubts as to her fine figure removed now, thanks to Nance’s skillful reformation of the blue homespun; and little Otoyo looking more like a mechanical toy than ever, since she had taken on a little more of the desirable flesh, according to the taste of her countrymen.
“Melissa and I have determined to move into a suite together,” said Otoyo, as they entered. “Miss Walker said it is not usually for a Freshman and Senior to be so intimately, but since there is a suite vacant in the Quadrangle and more visits for singletons than suites, she is willing.”
“You are excited over it, I know, you dear little Otoyo,” said her tutor, “or you would not be so adverbial, and you must mean ‘calls for singletons’ instead of ‘visits.’”
“Oh, you English and your language, made for what you call puns!”
“I am glad you call them puns instead of visiting them on us,” said Nance, dodging a soft cushion hurled by Molly. “Did you girls hear the news? I am to stay at Wellington for Christmas and my father is coming down here to spend it with me. I can’t think when father has taken a holiday before, and I am as excited about it as can be. He needs a rest, and he needs some fun. I wish he could have come last year before the old guard disbanded.”
“But listen to me,” put in Molly. “I have some news, too, that I was trying to keep for a surprise, but I am a sieve where news is concerned: Judy Kean is to be here for Christmas, too. She writes that as her mother and father are in Turkey she will have to have some turkey in her, and she can think of no place that she would rather have that turkey than at Wellington with us. Dear old Judy, won’t it be fun? And she will help to whoop things up for your father, Nance. She expected to be studying art in Paris by now, but Mr. Kean insisted on a year of drawing in New York before Paris, and that makes her in easy reach of us. We shall have to stop work and go to playing. I declare I have grown so used to work—I don’t believe I know how to play.”