PEGGY PARSONS

A HAMPTON FRESHMAN

BY

ANNABEL SHARP

AUTHOR OF “PEGGY PARSONS AT PREP SCHOOL”

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY

CHICAGO—NEW YORK

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Last year Peggy Parsons and Katherine Foster were room-mates at Andrews Preparatory School.

Their escapades and their hunger for good times and adventure kept them from being great favorites of the principal there, but they were loved by the girls of the school and were soon invested with a degree of leadership.

“Peggy Parsons at Prep School,” the first book in this series, tells how much happiness they managed to crowd into a single year.

A would-be charitable enterprise of Peggy’s is recounted, also. And if she had never undertaken it, mistaken though she was, she could not have gone to Hampton, and the present volume would never have been written.

Mr. Huntington, a rich old man, whom people believed to be poverty-stricken because of the way he lived, became a great friend of Peggy’s as the result of a Thanksgiving dinner party she arranged for the cooking-class of her school to give him.

She and Katherine were instrumental, through an adventure in playing amateur detectives, in finding Mr. Huntington’s grandson, of whom he had lost track.

The grandson—the “Jim” of the present book—was an Amherst student about Peggy’s own age.

Katherine Foster had planned to go to Hampton College, but Peggy could not see her way clear. The room-mates were broken-hearted at the prospect of not being together for another year. After Katherine had been assigned another room-mate, Gloria Hazeltine, Peggy gave up hope of going and could not plan with any interest for any other kind of year.

Mr. Huntington then stepped in and turned over for Peggy’s use the income from a dear little group of bungalows which he had named “Parsons Court.”

So Katherine and Peggy were enabled to look forward to college together just as they had their prep school.

PEGGY PARSONS

A HAMPTON FRESHMAN

[CHAPTER I—MAKING AN IMPRESSION]

“Katherine Foster!”

“Peggy Parsons!”

Two suit-cases went banging down on the wooden platform and two radiant figures hurled themselves into each other’s arms, oblivious of the shriek of departing trains, the rattling of baggage trucks, and the jostling crowds who were at liberty to laugh at their impulsiveness.

For this was Springfield, where East meets West on its way to half a dozen New England colleges, and where every fall the same scenes of joyous greeting are enacted with the annual accompaniment of little squeals of delighted welcome and many glad kisses.

“Well, Peggy, you look just the same as ever!”

“It’s been a perfect century, Katherine! Going right up to Hampton? Taking the 9:10? So am I. Oh, so much to talk about——”

Breathlessly chattering all the while, the two girls in blue serge, who had been room-mates last year at preparatory school, gathered up their suit-cases again and crossed the tracks to the other side of the station to wait for the Hampton train. Engines steamed along before and behind them, but neither looked away from the other’s glowing face during the crossing, nor did they cease both to talk at once until they were actually seated in their train some time later, packed in with a mob of laughing and attractive girls with suit-cases in the aisles, in the racks over their heads, and in their laps.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we met this way?” cried Katherine, while Peggy was trying to hand the remaining untraveled bits of their tickets to the perspiring conductor. “We’ll see our new rooms for the first time together, and we’ll make a very nice impression on the inhabitants of Ambler House because we can plan out some kind of grand entry to appeal to them.”

Peggy laughed. “It’s an awfully big place we’re going to,” she said, looking about at the swaying crowds of girls. “I’m just beginning to realize it. It will take more than our planning to make any impression at all, I think. And maybe nobody will ever notice us. It won’t be like Andrews.”

“You’re still Peggy Parsons, aren’t you? And I’m still your room-mate, Katherine Foster. And we’re going to live in one of the grandest suites on campus—oh, I don’t believe they will pass us by altogether.” And Katherine gave a little swaggering motion of her head that sent Peggy into gales of laughter.

“You’re conceited and snobbish, friend room-mate,” she giggled. “The summer has spoiled you.”

But Katherine smiled back complacently into her eyes.

Suddenly there was a curious stir all about them. The girls who had been standing in the aisle were all pushing toward the end of the car, and those seated were struggling up from under their luggage, their faces bright with anticipation.

“Katherine,” whispered Peggy, “I think we’re there!”

Oh, the world of meaning in that one sentence. The hopes, the expectations, the pleasures and good times for four whole years were summed up in it, and Katherine silently nodded her head, unable to speak.

The brakeman was already calling out something that he meant for “Hampton,” and he rounded out his shout with the long-drawn wail, “Don’t leave any articles in the car!”

As if any of those precious and bulky suit-cases could be forgotten! The stampede began in earnest as soon as the train stopped, and Peggy and Katherine found themselves swept out to the platform and jostled down the steps and thrust forward toward the station of their own college town.

The girls from the train rushed this way and that, and other girls from the college rushed to meet them. Katherine spied a taxi that had still two vacant seats.

“Come, taxi,—quick,” she gasped in Peggy’s ear. And the two went running forward, their suit-cases bumping and thumping against their knees. Before they reached the machine they saw that they were racing with a mob of other girls, all frankly eager to be the first to secure places in the last cab with a vacancy.

In every direction other taxis were whirring off, filled to overflowing with girls and bags, and here and there the rumble of hoofs mixed in, as a pair of horses drawing an old-fashioned cab likewise laden dashed off.

Peggy and Katherine were panting. It had become a very exciting race. A taller girl, with a lighter suit-case, sprinted ahead of them and reached the taxi first. But she stopped to ask the driver his price, and while she was doing so Katherine and Peggy piled in.

The taller girl turned to take her rightful place and saw two hot and beaming young ladies in the exact corner she had run so hard to claim.

She stepped back with a chagrined laugh, and Peggy and Katherine laughed too, with the utmost good nature, now that they had attained what they sought. They heard the other two occupants of their car murmuring the names of college houses to the chauffeur, and with a thrill of pride Peggy said, “Ambler House.”

“And you, miss?” the driver asked Katherine.

“Why, Ambler House, too, of course,” she said, and then blushed scarlet for fear the other girls would think her an idiot, for at the moment it had indeed seemed to her that even a taxi-cab driver ought to know that she was going to live in college wherever Peggy was.

The quaint, prim streets of the New England town were nothing but so much colored confusion to the eyes of the four in the cab. Each one had a consciousness that this perhaps was the height of life: that they would never touch anything better than this again. Riding along thus, packed tight in a taxi, through Hampton, to college for the first time.

They felt as if all previous experiences were washed away—and all future ones unknown and unguessed at. Everything was before them—the glory of being young singing in their hearts and going to their heads like wine—what wonder that they felt life had been made just for them and was already beginning to yield its fruits into their eager hands!

The cab went grating up a hill, and in a moment there was a bright stretch of green before them, with any number of red brick buildings on it, some of them covered with ivy. Hampton College was spread before their gaze without any warning to prepare them. But each girl knew, as if she had seen it often, that this was really College.

Katherine and Peggy craned their necks quite frankly out of the window, and when they drew their heads in, the other girls followed their example shamelessly.

“It looks—nice,” ventured Peggy, with a long sigh of satisfaction.

“It looks just—the way I thought it would,” answered one of the strangers, and then gave a little embarrassed laugh because her voice had sounded so thrilled.

The taxi made a sharp turn, and they were actually inside the sacred precincts of Campus—there on each side were the rows of college houses, and in the distance was a magnificent structure of stone. The morning sun shone over it all. A sense of homelikeness and a strange comfortable feeling of love for it came, even at this first view, into their hearts.

“We are to live in one of these houses,” Peggy rapturously reminded Katherine. “In a moment the taxi will stop and it will be our house. Katherine, pinch my arm. It all seems so queerly familiar, maybe I’m just dreaming it after all.”

But the taxi did stop in a minute or two, and the driver was opening the door and saying “Ambler House” in a matter-of-fact tone. The two other girls nodded good-bye to Peggy and Katherine. Katherine stepped down and was handed her bag. Peggy was conscious that the long porch of the brick house before which they had drawn up was filled with girls interestedly watching for freshman newcomers. She thought of their plan to make a good initial impression, and descended as gracefully as might be, with a charming little smile of eagerness and anticipation that was not assumed at all.

The driver was lifting down her heavy suit-case. And then quite unexpectedly came the fall that follows pride. Only, while the pride had been Peggy’s, the fall was her suit-case’s.

Thump! Thud! it went smashing down to the ground, and its bulging sides flew apart, and hair-brushes, mirrors, nightgown, kimono, and powder boxes and tooth paste all shot out in every direction and rolled ignominiously about on the campus lawn, in full view of the crowded porch of Ambler House.

Peggy’s crimson ears caught shrieks of laughter, her tear-filled eyes saw girlish figures doubling up in mirth—and under her feet and round about, the ground was white with powder, redolent with oozing perfume and strewn with her most intimate belongings.

There was something about it all that had the awful publicity of a nightmare. Such things couldn’t really happen. Oh, if she could only melt away—or wake up or even crawl back into the taxi and hide.

“Shall I help you pick the things up?”

“I’m afraid this powder can never be scraped up again. I’ve put some back into the box, but there’s quite a bit of grass and gravel mixed with it.”

She was completely surrounded by helpful girls, who had flown out from the porch, their laughter still on their lips, and were now kneeling and stooping everywhere about the scene of the catastrophe.

“Your clean shirtwaist,” cried one of these helpers sympathetically, as she pulled a fragile bit of dimity and Cluny lace from under the taxi-cab where it had fluttered. “It won’t be good for very much now until it’s laundered.”

Into the suit-case the things were tumbled with despatch but not neatness. The taxi driver was contrite, but he did not offer to touch any of the scattered feminine luggage and insisted quite audibly that there had been “too many things in there anyway.”

Katherine paid him, eying him reproachfully, and he chugged away, leaving the two heart-broken freshmen greatly discomfited by the mishap.

Thus it was that the two girls who had hoped to make so attractive an impression slunk into Ambler House with a straggling procession of merry followers behind them carrying odds and ends that refused to be crammed back into the damaged suit-case. And thus it came about also that they looked about Suite 22 with blind eyes and failed to realize that it was one of “the grandest suites on Campus” and overlooked Paradise.

Peggy sat down in a little heap on the window seat in their living-room and didn’t even appreciate that it was a window seat, and one of very, very few at college.

“I’m glad it—didn’t happen in Springfield,” was the first thing Peggy said.

“Ye-es,” admitted Katherine, standing uncertainly in the middle of the room. And then she added irrelevantly: “I think there are awfully nice girls in this house.”

Peggy buried her little burning face in the upholstery of the window seat. “Do—you?” she asked in muffled tones. “I didn’t dare look at them.”

“I thought they seemed a very—jolly set,” pursued Katherine tentatively.

She was rewarded by a rueful chuckle from the figure on the window seat.

“And anyway,” Katherine followed up her advantage, “they did notice us,—more than they do most freshmen. Paid rather particular attention, in fact.”

That was too much for happy-go-lucky little Peggy and she laughed until she shook, even while the contradictory tears ran forth from her swollen eyes and trickled through her fingers onto the green leather seat-cushion.

“I—I’ll—never go down to luncheon, Kathie,” she protested between a laugh and a sob. “I’ll never go outside this room again. I can’t possibly bear to look them in the face.”

Rap-tap-tap!

Katherine whirled toward the door and Peggy sat up.

Rap-tap-tap! It was more insistent this time, and the knob of the door turned even as Peggy called out a none too cordial “Come” that broke pathetically in the middle.

A dark-haired girl entered impetuously, a sparkle in her friendly eyes. Peggy remembered her with an inward qualm as one of the most appreciative spectators on the porch a few moments ago.

“Aren’t you folks crazy about your rooms? Have you seen the view over Paradise? It’s wonderful. I’ve been wondering who would have these. I live right across the hall—and I—I——”

Those sparkling eyes fairly danced now, and Peggy became aware of a tiny package being thrust forward by the pretty visitor.

“I saw yours was trampled, so I brought you some tooth-paste!” finished the girl, to their amazement.

She had scarcely left them, swinging mentally between indignation and bewildered gratitude, when a pair of girls came unceremoniously in upon them without knocking at all, and stood hesitating before them, arms entwined about each other and holding something half out of sight.

“I always think it’s a ghastly thing to be without powder,” one of them finally mustered the courage to say, “and I came away with two boxes. It’s rice powder, flesh tint,—I hope you like that as well as white; and I brought you some—and a chamois. Yours was muddy. I picked it up, but I parted with it again. I knew you wouldn’t possibly want it,—it couldn’t make your face anything but black.”

“And here’s a—waist.” The other was speaking now. “I thought you might be—traveling light, and—since nobody’s trunks have come, please wear this down to luncheon. It’s my best one, so I won’t deprecate it at all. I think it’s a darling, and if you’ll give it its first wearing, I’ll be only too happy.”

Katherine glanced across at Peggy and smiled. Her room-mate was wiping away the last gleam of moisture from her eyes, and the inner sunlight of her spirit was beginning to shine through the gloom.

She rose and went toward the girls, but they laid their offerings on a chair and withdrew. While Peggy was looking after them appreciatively, another stranger entered on a similar mission.

For fifteen minutes, while Peggy and Katherine were making themselves presentable for luncheon, the gift-bearers kept coming, leaving their present on the dressing-table in the bedroom or the window seat in the living-room, sometimes saying nothing at all, and sometimes a great deal.

“You won’t mind going down now?” Katherine asked.

“N-not so much,” admitted Peggy, putting dabs of perfume out of various bottles here and there on her cheered-up countenance, on her fluffy gold-brown hair, and on the new waist, contributed.

For at least six girls had brought perfume and loyal Peggy meant to have one represented just as truly as another, so she followed this neutral course of using all,—with a resulting odor that was anything but neutral.

As she went into the big dining-room, each giver could distinctly discern the pervading sweetness of her own scent bottle and was satisfied.

It seemed to Peggy that every face was lifted and turned toward her as she and Katherine came in. There was a temptation to walk with lowered eyes, and sink into the seat the head waitress might indicate, without meeting a single person’s gaze.

But casting this desire aside, she went in bravely, her eyes taking in the whole room. And every girl smiled back at her with the very essence of friendship and proprietorship, for there was hardly a girl in the room who had not contributed something that the radiant freshman was even then wearing, or had just made use of.

So Peggy did not have to wait until the others in her house had learned to love her, but she was taken from the first day into their hearts. And she felt the warmth of their love around her even while she went through so prosaic a ceremony as the partaking of a meager college luncheon.

[CHAPTER II—SUITE 22]

It was right in the middle of Freshman Rains.

The faces of the new girls appeared white and mournful, pressed against the dormitory windows, or flushed and laughing from between rubber helmets and slickers out on the campus, according to their dispositions.

Up and down the second floor corridor of Ambler House trooped the usual forenoon procession, umbrella tips clicking on the polished boards: those who were going out to classes making a flapping sound with their rubber garments, those returning giving out a sloshing noise that advertised the weather outside in an unfavorable manner.

Before several of the doors wet umbrellas were open on the floor to dry, while tiny rivulets trickled steadily from the steel prongs. They looked like big black bats which had flown in to seek shelter from the outer torrents and might be expected to take wing again at any minute.

It was not a hilarious atmosphere at best, but, to add to its dripping depression, two wails of a most long-drawn and lugubrious sort began to be wafted down the length of the hall over the tops of the wet umbrellas, drifting in heart-brokenly through the students’ doors, and dying away in receding cadences whenever a disconsolate head lifted itself from a cushion to listen or a helmet strap was shoved back from a surprised and inquisitive ear.

“M—MMm-MO-O-Oh,” went the wail, and then “Moo-oo-oo,” with a pastoral significance that was particularly mystifying.

No use for any girl to tell herself that this was the wind howling—or the rain dejectedly descending on a tin roof—for no wind ever howled so precisely up and down scales with such sobbingly human and barnyard notes, and no rain was ever known to be so surprisingly vocal, nor so loud and threatening one moment and so tremulously broken and far away the next.

“Go! Gug-gug-go! Gug-gug-GO-go-go!” screamed the dual wail, apparently expressive of the utmost suffering, and yet, through it all, maintaining a baffling rhythmical quality and a monotony of utterance that sent a shuddering wonder in its wake as it coursed down the hall.

But during such a disheartening season as Freshman Rains the spirit of investigation is not keen, and the residents on the second floor preferred to distract their attention by lessons that must be learned or by long and rambling letters home that ended with vague hints that somebody in their house was being killed down the hall.

It was not until the voices broke out into wild and mirthless laughter that their apathetic spirits were aroused to protest.

“Goodness, girls, what’s that awful noise?” an indignant brown head poked itself out from one of the umbrella-guarded doors and sent its peevish remonstrance down the corridor. In an instant every door framed a face—or two faces—and a babble of questions was echoed back and forth.

But triumphantly right through the shrill notes of their eager queries rang the weird and displeasing sound that had so disturbed them.

“Ha-HA! Ho-HO! He-HEE! Haw-HAW!”

“It’s too much!” averred the girl who had spoken first. “Where is that sound being made? And what is it? Seems to me as if it were from Suite 22—do you think somebody is torturing those freshmen?” It was just what everybody did think, but they dreaded the admission. “Let’s go in there,” the girl continued, “and—and find out.” She ended rather weakly, shrinking before the task of investigating so unearthly a sound as that.

The girls were flocking forth, some still in their damp slickers, the rain glistening on them; others all immaculate just as they were ready to start out to recitations: and still a lazy third contingent, who had not yet had any classes or who were wantonly cutting them, as sweet as flowers in Japanese silk kimonos and little pattering slippers.

Together they made the charge on Door 22.

Crowding in at the breach as it swung open, they gasped in sudden bewilderment at the sight that met their eyes.

Standing rigidly side by side like two soldiers on parade, but with their hands solemnly placed upon their diaphragms while they emitted simultaneously the weird noises that had alarmed the house, were Peggy Parsons and Katherine Foster, the idols of Ambler House!

Their eyes widened at the wholesale intrusion and their hands fell limply to their sides, and then, as the indignant chorus broke out around them, they looked at each other in crimson confusion and burst out laughing.

“Why—c-could you h-h-hear us, g-girls?” cried Katherine incoherently through her shaking spasms of mirth.

“Hear you?” echoed Hazel Pilcher, who had led the charge upon them. “Hear? Well, my dears, did you think you were exactly whispering? I never listened to so awful a concert in my life. It’s a wonder I didn’t call the house-matron. Oh, you incorrigible youngsters, what in the world was it?”

Peggy’s face assumed an aggrieved expression immediately.

“It was only our lesson,” she responded somewhat sulkily.

“Lesson! My goodness, what are they giving the freshmen now that their lessons turn out to be imitations of a menagerie? Why, when I was a freshman”—(with a very superior air, for Hazel Pilcher was now enjoying all the glory of a sophomore’s exalted position)—“we had Latin and French and math and history, but I never heard of a course in ghostly noises. I’m sure that in my year they at least spared us that.”

“Just the samey that was our lesson,” Peggy persisted, “that was our practice work for to-morrow’s yell.”

“Do you mean——?” Hazel began to understand, for one cannot be a sophomore without knowing most of the abbreviations in which college terminology abounds.

“Elocution, if we have to simplify it,” said Peggy. “I suppose you girls didn’t take that course. Well, Katherine and I are just—taking it for all it’s worth. I guess we want to learn to speak correctly and place our voices right from the diaphragm and make full and open tones——”

“Spare muh!” interposed a senior who was known to be already practicing up for dramatics. “I hear nothing but that sort of thing all day long these days. I might have guessed what your vocal gymnastics meant—but they were so particularly horrible——”

“Well, the worse they sound the better they are,” murmured Peggy, deprecatingly. “And I thought myself we did it rather well.”

Elocution, or, as the girls called it with enthusiasm, yellocution or yell, was an elective course that entailed no studying, but a vast deal of labor along a different line. The victims who were beguiled into taking it, thinking to gain an easy course minus mental effort, that would count nevertheless a perfectly good two hours a week for their degree, were often mere tearful wrecks after the first few days when they were stood up before an enormous, gaping class and put through test after test to the running accompaniment of wounding comment on their enunciation, their manner, their throats, their gestures—everything.

They became acquainted for the first time with all the distressful mystery of larynxes and pharynxes—which most of them had always supposed were the names of diseases—they learned about diaphragms, too, and were forced to breathe in different ways and shout and cry “Ha-ha,” all the time feeling for the muscular hammer stroke at their waist lines. It was so embarrassing to Peggy at first that she couldn’t make any sound at all when they told her to say “Ha-ha,” and it was only after three attempts that she managed a faint and disheartened squeak.

“Your voice is little and thin,” criticised the teacher sharply. “I shall give you exercises to round it out.”

And that’s what she had done, and these were what Peggy and her faithful room-mate were practicing at the moment of the inrush of visitors.

She explained to her guests how little and thin her voice was, but they laughed scornfully and said if she had any more of a one, they’d see that she was put off campus, that, as far as they were concerned, they believed she had the biggest and the fattest voice on record, which seemed to restore Peggy’s self-respect in a way marvelous to behold.

“A person can be happy,” she assured them conversationally, “just so long as she doesn’t know anything about herself—how she talks, how she looks or how she impresses other people. But the minute you get her conscious of all these larynx-pharynx-diaphragm machines inside her she’ll never know another happy minute until she conquers them all and can speak just like a Nazimova with ’em. Though Nazimova is rather sobby, I’m told—maybe I’d better train myself up after Blanche Ring instead.”

“Peggy,” Katherine put in at this point questioningly, “don’t you think we might set the water over and give the girls some tea?”

At this delightful prospect many of the girls—especially the little lazy kimonoed ones—sat right down wherever they happened to be, in a chair or on the floor, with such looks of blissful anticipation on their faces that they were a pleasant sight. It wasn’t often tea was served in the middle of a rainy forenoon and the two Andrews freshmen were already so practiced in little parties before they came to college, that even a cup of tea served by them had a grace and an added interest, that it could not have possessed in the rooms of girls who were just tasting their first bit of life away from home.

Peggy looked in some consternation at the comfortable crowd with its expectant and gleeful expression, and demurred slowly.

“I just have to train my voice,” she said, “but I suppose, even with them here, I can go right on?”

A groan greeted this proposal that was anything but complimentary.

Peggy looked hurt. “Oh, you just wait,” she said vindictively, but with a laugh struggling for utterance at the same time. “Some day you’ll pay to hear me—see if you won’t—and I mean to work at it right along all through four years and then—and—then——” her voice grew dreamy and her eyes stared off into a heavenly future, “and then maybe I can be in the mob at senior dramatics!”

The senior of the party laughed at the pretty compliment, for she herself was only in the mob, and her classmates didn’t think she had such a marvelous success either—so it was pleasant to have the adoration of a popular freshman.

“I’m sure you will be,” she said graciously, “and with one accord we all accept the future mob member’s invitation to tea.” And she sat down with the rest and waited patiently.

With a sigh, Peggy lit the little alcohol lamp under the tea kettle and Katherine dived mysteriously under the desk to emerge a moment later with something that sent a general shout of approval through the entire group.

“A box! A box!” they cried, “Katherine has a box from home!”

Nothing else in life possesses quite the wonder and the satisfying delight of a real box from home. If the parents at home only knew of the wide-eyed envy of all the girls as they cluster around one of these brighteners of college existence as it is being opened, there would be a continuous procession of expressmen tramping in at the back door of all the college houses, week in and week out, and every single closet shelf would hold its quota of jam jars, home-made cookies, and fine large grape-fruit so that the same glow of satisfaction and sense of being loved would abide in each girl’s heart all the time.

The tea ball was being daintily dipped in and out of the steaming cups, the cold chicken was being eagerly passed down the line of girls, when the door of suite 22 opened again and a confused and blushing stranger, tall, with wonderful reddish hair and baby-blue eyes, stepped inside and asked in a voice that was so full of fright that it would never have passed in that elocution class of Peggy’s, if this was Miss Katherine Foster’s room.

“I’m trying to find Miss Foster,” the scared voice went on, “because I was to have roomed with her this year. I’m Gloria——”

With a single bound, the impulsive Peggy had reached the beautiful stranger and had thrown her arms around her neck. It was all her fault, she was thinking, all her fault that this nice, nice girl had been deprived of the finest room-mate on campus, for while Peggy and Katherine were at Andrews Preparatory School, Peggy had not known that she herself could go to college until the last minute, and Katherine had already been assigned another room-mate. When Peggy had been given the money to come, however, by old Mr. Huntington, her friend, Katherine had written to Gloria Hazeltine—who stood before them now—and had explained that she just must room with her own Peggy, and would Gloria mind and she could easily find somebody else.

Neither of the girls had seen Gloria before, but at this first glimpse of her, Peggy’s heart was warm with a sense of wanting to make up to her for having taken her place, and hence the smothering arms she wrapped so quickly around the newcomer’s neck.

All the embarrassment of the new guest fled at this surprisingly eager reception. She drew back from Peggy’s arms and smiled happily down into her face.

“Oh, oh,” she cried, “I wish more than ever that you were my room-mate! Which is Peggy Parsons that has taken you away from me?”

Peggy at once saw the other’s mistake and flushed. “I’m the guilty party,” she admitted. “I’m Peggy. But I want you please to like me a little—anyway. And now——” suddenly changing to a business-like tone of hospitality, “sit right down and have some tea. Girls, this is Morning Glory, Katherine’s and my best friend. You don’t mind my calling you that?” she inquired anxiously. “That’s the way Katherine and I spoke of you to ourselves and you—your looks bear it out so well,” she faltered.

Gloria, very much taken into the Ambler House set, and already being plied with tea and wonderful beaten biscuit, didn’t mind anything, and in a few minutes the whole room seemed to glow with a pervading happiness and content that took no account of the gloomy weather outside, and for this season at least the bugaboo ghost of the Freshman Rains was laid.

[CHAPTER III—PEGGY’S MASTERPIECE]

Peggy was bending absorbedly over her desk one evening biting her pen and then writing a bit and now and then crossing out part of what she had written, all with a kind of seraphic smile that puzzled Katherine more and more until she finally just had to speak about it.

“What are you doing, room-mate?” she demanded; “that look is so—so awfully unlike your usual expression.”

“Hush,” said Peggy, glancing up and waving her pen solemnly toward the other. “It’s a poet’s look.”

“A——? Peggy Parsons, you’re rooming with me under false pretenses. If you’re going to turn into a genius I’m going home. You know I perfectly hate geniuses and there are so many funny ones around college. I always thought that at least you——” her tone was scathing and beseeching at the same time, “at least you were immune.”

“Maybe I am,” said Peggy speculatively. “What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“Immune. Could a person be it without knowing it, do you suppose?”

Katherine had thrown herself across the room and had kissed Peggy fervently and repentantly at this remark. “Oh, I take it all back, Peggy,” she cried, “you’re not a genius. They always understand every word in the dictionary and you are—you are just a dear little dunce, after all!”

“Well, I like that!” exclaimed the injured young poet. “Let me read you this, Katherine,” she continued with shining eyes, “and then you’ll see—oh, Katherinekins, Katherinekins, what a bright room-mate you have, and how proud you’ll be of me to-morrow when Miss Tillotson reads this out in English 13.”

Katherine glanced toward the inky manuscript suspiciously.

“Is it very long?” she inquired.

Peggy only shot her a reproachful glance and began to read in a sweet, thrilly voice, that already showed the effects of strenuous elocution training and would have made the veriest nonsense in the world seem beautiful by reason of its triumphant youth and its perfect conviction.

“Dreams that are dear—of night—of day—

All I could think or hope or plan:

Naught is so sweet in that dream world’s sway

As this wonderful hour of the Present’s span.

There was a silence in the room when she had finished, and Peggy folded her manuscript up tenderly and laid it away on her desk with an air that was little short of reverent.

“How did you do it?” breathed Katherine, carried away by the magic of the voice rather than by any clear idea of what the voice had read. But she had a great deal of faith in Peggy, and anything she would read like that must be very fine. So Katherine passed her judgment on it immediately.

“Do you like it?” Peggy pleaded, “oh, do you? Oh, I’m so glad. It’s—it’s just a piece of my soul, Katherine.”

Katherine accompanied her room-mate to English 13 next day with a pleasant sense of exhilaration in her heart, for wasn’t this the day Peggy was to be praised before them all—freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors alike—for her wonderful poem?

There was a little stir and flutter through Recitation room 27 as the bright-eyed young literary lights of the college trooped in.

English 13 had to be held in the largest recitation room on campus, for it was the one class that everybody would rather go to than not. It was purely elective with a number of divisions and you could walk by and decide whether or not you wanted to go in—and you always decided to go in.

Grey sweaters over the backs of chairs, a blur of black furs, youthful heads with hair all done alike, lolling arms along the chair-tops, slim white hands toying with pencils or sweater buttons—a gigantic, lazy, comfortable, enjoying-life sort of a class when you came in from the back of the room, but as you went down toward the front and glanced back, there was a light of eager anticipation shining in every face, a universal expression of intelligent interest such as it is the fortune of few college professors, alas, to behold in this world.

Peggy and Katherine had dropped the wonderful poem in the 13 box outside the door—it being written on pale-blue paper so that Peggy would recognize it at once in the bundle that would soon be brought in, in Miss Tillotson’s arms.

They sat as near the front as they could get, and that queer, unaccountable, crimson uneasiness that affects authors when their work is about to be read in public—part pleasurable but mostly agony—swept Peggy in a miserable flood and she sat deaf, dumb and blind to all that was going on around her until she heard the bell strike that announced the opening of class.

Miss Tillotson at this minute came in, her arms full of manuscript, as usual, her glance moving lightly over the rustling audience of girls, who were beginning to sit up straight with that eager interest flaming. Miss Tillotson was always sure of a response. From the moment she fingered the first manuscript and began to read in her wonderful voice that made the good things seem so much better than they were and the bad things so much worse, every pause she made, every raised-eye-brow query, every slight little twist of amused smile was received with a collective long-drawn breath, a murmur of appreciation or a small, sudden sweeping storm of laughter that convulsed the entire giant class at once, only to drop away suddenly to still attention as her voice again picked up the thread of narrative or resumed the verse.

It is a pity but true that Peggy heard absolutely nothing of her adored 13 to-day until her own blue-folded poem was lifted up. She had gone through a hundred different emotions in the few minutes that she had already spent in this classroom. Every time Miss Tillotson’s fingers lingered near her manuscript in selecting what next to read, a shiver of despair went up and down her spine. Oh, why had she done such a thing? She, only a freshman, to have had the effrontery to write a poem when all these upper-classmen—and even the Monthly board members—were in the class—and had written such wonderful things! Of course there was the approval of Katherine by which she had set so much store a short few hours ago. But—she glanced at Katherine now sitting so tranquilly beside her. Katherine was only a freshman herself! What did her approval mean? She hated herself for the disloyalty of the thought, but still she could not help wishing that she had never shown the poem to Katherine and then she could make out it was some one else’s and not have to suffer the awful humiliation——

Miss Tillotson was reading! Oh, it had actually come—this horrible calamity! Nothing could happen to save her now. Her poor little blue poem was being read out to all these wonderful girls of Hampton and she could not prevent it. Drowning, drowning in a sea of confusion, there drifted hazily through Peggy’s mind a pathetic story she had once read in a newspaper about a man whose ship was sinking and who had put a note in a bottle, “All hope gone. Good-bye forever.”

When the smooth voice of Miss Tillotson stopped there was a slight rustle over the class, and then with one accord the girls burst out into a laugh.

It was the merest ripple of enjoying titter, but in Peggy’s crimson ears it roared and echoed until the mocking sound of it was the one thing in the world. She lifted her swimming eyes and kept them on Miss Tillotson’s face and even achieved a somewhat ghastly smile on her own account, believing, poor child, that she could thus keep secret the awful fact of her identity as the writer of that “thing”—the poem had already descended to this title in her mind—and that neither Miss Tillotson nor the girls need ever know.

“If all that the writer could ‘think or hope or plan’ is expressed in this particular—flight,” smiled Miss Tillotson, with that dear little quirk to her mouth that Peggy had loved so many times but which hurt now, oh, beyond words to tell, “I should think that dream world of hers would resemble a nightmare.”

Another gale of laughter swept the class, fluffy heads leaned back against the chairs in abandon and shirt-waisted shoulders shook.

Peggy felt that if Katherine looked at her or ventured a pat of sympathy she would die. But Katherine, when Peggy’s miserable glance sought her face, was gazing interestedly around the room from literary light to literary light as if to determine which could have been guilty of the blue manuscript. It certainly was a brilliant way to ward off detection from her room-mate and Peggy was grateful.

Peggy hardly knew how she got home that day. She and Katherine did not speak until they had gained the safety of their own suite and then they put a “Busy” sign on the door, and sat down on their couch.

“Katherine,” said Peggy at last, “one of two things must happen now. Either I shall never touch pen to paper again or I’ll keep at writing until I make a success of it and show Miss Tillotson that I can after all.”

“Yes, room-mate,” agreed Katherine solemnly, “that’s the only alternative open to you now.”

The tragic whiteness of Peggy’s face deepened.

“Never again, or—never give it up until I’ve made good,” she murmured. “It might mean—more times like this, Katherine, if I kept on,” she reminded tentatively.

“Yes, Peggy,” Katherine answered slowly, “I think it would mean more times like this.”

“And nothing but my own determination to go on,—no reason to think I have any particular talent or ability—she has already taken away all that notion. Just the will to do it whether I can or not—to show her that I can.”

“Yes,” agreed Katherine once more, “that’s all you’d have to go on. I think you are good at writing, but then I think you can do anything. I can’t write myself, so my opinion really isn’t so very valuable. You’d have to do it without encouragement.”

“I want her respect, Katherine; I want to have her think in the end that I’m the best writer that ever took Thirteen, but—it would mean giving most of my time and all my energies to my English—and I might not turn out any good in the end.”

“True,” Katherine again attacked her room-mate’s problem, “and if you never touch pen to paper again” (the phrase had them both) “you can soon forget this hurt to-day and you need not put yourself in a similar position again, and your main work can go to—well, to math or anything else.”

Peggy paced up and down the room and Katherine, never doubting but that this was the most serious problem that had ever been fought out in college, followed her room-mate’s figure with eyes that brimmed with sympathy and a heartful of affectionate loyalty that longed to be of help and could not.

“Say, Peggy,” she said suddenly, “I want to take a note over to the note-room for one of the girls in my Latin class. Don’t you want to come along? This doesn’t have to be decided all at once, does it?”

Peggy silently slipped on her sweater again and the girls ran across the campus to the big recitation hall and thence down the basement steps to the note-room. Crowds of girls were swarming into and out of this place where, on little boards—one to each class—the girls left their communications for each other under the proper initials. In so large a college it was necessary to have some easy and direct means of reaching each other without delay or the expense of telephone or postage. Every girl went to the note-room once every day—and a particularly popular one ran down after each class to gather in the sheaves of invitations, business notes, and club meeting announcements that were sure to be hers.

Peggy and Katherine squeezed through the crowds, greeting many other freshmen as they were suddenly brought face to face, and at length they stood before the freshman bulletin and Katherine stuck her note in the rack at the letter R, while Peggy glanced, from habit, back to her own initial. There were many little important-looking notes stuck upright over the letter P, and Peggy fingered them over listlessly. Delia Porter, Helen Pearson, Margaret Perry and so on, until all at once from the most inviting looking of all leaped her own name, Peggy Parsons, in perfectly unfamiliar writing—writing almost too assured to be that of a freshman at all.

Wonderingly she unfolded the little square, and then, jammed in by the other girls as she was, she flung her arms around Katherine’s neck and cried out with a sob of joy, “Oh, kiss me, Katherine!—they want my poem for the Monthly!”

From dull gray the world leaped to glowing radiance. For a freshman to be invited to give a poem to the Monthly! Her great problem was solved automatically, and Peggy would be an author from that time forth until she should be graduated.

“Let’s see your note,” urged Katherine, when they were out of the crowd once more. “I want to look at it myself.”

Peggy eagerly unfolded the precious thing again and read, while Katherine looked over her shoulder:

“My dear Miss Parsons—or wouldn’t it be more like college to say Peggy?—I’m writing to ask you if we may not have for the Monthly that little poem of yours that was read in Thirteen to-day? There are some changes in four of the lines, and if you’ll come over to my room this afternoon, I want you to make them yourself so that there will be as little as possible of my scribbling in it. Hoping to see you,

Ditto Armandale, Monthly Board,

Room 11, Macefield House.”

“Why, Peggy, do you remember that Ditto Armandale we met that day last year while you were standing under the waterfalls? And it was the sight of her and all those other Hampton girls that first made you want to come here! Miss Armandale invited me to come and see her that day, when I should get to Hamp, and she said you were just the sort that ought to come here—oh, isn’t it fine, Peggy!”

“Yes, but look here,” said Peggy, who was still reading over her note, “she says ‘changes in four of the lines.’ There were only four lines in it, Katherine, you remember.”

“That’s queer. But I’d go anyway.”

“Of course I will,—I don’t suppose she’ll remember me, but I’m glad she’s the one, she looked so nice and considerate that day.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“It’s an invitation house. I suppose a person ought to be awfully dressy,” Peggy said doubtfully.

“I don’t know,” murmured Katherine. “I shouldn’t think it would be necessary to dress much if you were just one of the multitude like me. But being one of the youngest authors in college, it’s different with you.”

With arms around each other’s shoulders, the room-mates strolled back across the campus toward Ambler House. The sunlight shone over the campus and over the moving army of girls going in every direction across it, for it was just at the end of recitation hour. None of them wore hats, so that the light gleamed down on their hair. Most of them wore white sweaters or sport coats, and under the arm of each was tucked a notebook or a stack of study volumes.

All of them walked in pairs, as Katherine and Peggy were doing, or in laughing groups that gathered numbers as they went on.

Peggy and Katherine began to have an intimate sense of belonging to it all. Hampton was becoming their college in a way it had not been before. This campus and those red brick buildings, those laughing crowds of girls, their hair blowing in the wind—these things were to represent their whole world for four years, and, tightening their hands on each other’s shoulders, they were glad it was to be so.

And Peggy held crushed in her free hand a tiny wad of paper, the tangible evidence that this first year promised success to her.

[CHAPTER IV—NEW PAINT AND POETRY]

A summons to visit an invitation house!

And on such a gratifying mission! Peggy smiled as she slipped into her rose-colored taffeta, and Katherine, watching her with pride, decided that “the poet’s look” had come back.

“Well, good luck, room-mate,” she called as Peggy went out the door, and she received one radiant glance in answer from the departing young bard.

The pleasantly warm tone of the rose-colored taffeta buoyed up the new genius’ spirit all across the campus until she came out into Green Street and beheld the imposing reality of Macefield House directly before her.

She had the fleeting and snobbish wish that all the girls of her class could see her turning thus assuredly up the walk to the famous senior house. To be sure, she couldn’t help casting a cold look of disapproval at the porch—it was the messiest porch she had seen anywhere in Hampton, but she supposed the celebrity inhabitants of Macefield were all too busy with their dinners and dances and social duties generally to notice how careless and extremely—impromptu—the approach to their home appeared.

The campus house porches all had chairs out on them and comfortable magazine tables—there were still a lot of hot fall days to look forward to—but on the Macefield House porch there was nothing. And somebody had carelessly left an old ladder lying down right in front of the steps! Peggy had a very hard time scrambling over it. Perhaps it was just as well the other Freshman girls weren’t there to see her after all. She must admit there was considerable loss of dignity involved in scrambling over an old paint-specked ladder that was so completely in her way.

Her face was flushed to the color of her dress when she finally climbed the steps. Even in her confusion she noticed that the porch floor looked strangely new and that it seemed to have a tendency to cling a little and impede her footsteps.

“It’s probably because I’m getting scared that I imagine my feet stick to the boards,” she mused uncomfortably. “I don’t know how a person should act at an invitation house. Whether you’re supposed to walk right in or——”

That part of her problem was settled immediately, for she found the door locked. Gathering what self-confidence she could, she pressed the bell.

Uneasily she shifted from one to the other of the sticking feet. No one came. She knew it was rude to ring twice, but she felt she would never have the heart to come again if she didn’t see the great editor of the Monthly now and get everything arranged. So she pressed a shaking finger nervously against the bell, and held it so until she heard a rustling inside the house. The door opened—just a crack—and a surprised head poked itself into view. Peggy had a jumbled and confused impression all at once. She was aware of the speechless amazement in the eyes, also that the face was not that of a girl at all, but belonged to a rather severe looking and decidedly middle-aged woman.

With a little jump of her heart she realized that she was meeting the gaze of the matron of Macefield House. Campus house matrons were regarded in the light either of common enemies or motherly souls, whose hearts responded to all college-girls’ troubles. But what might the matron of an invitation house be like? Peggy thought she must be something incomparably greater.

“Is Miss Armandale in?” she asked weakly.

“She may be, but she’d be up in her room,” answered the head ungraciously enough, while its owner apparently did not intend to admit the enemy within the fortifications, since no move was made to open the door wider.

“Well——” murmured Peggy, with a sudden realization that she was standing in wet paint,—“shall I—go up—and—and find out?”

“By the back door if you wish,” said the head witheringly. “If you came in this way, you’d Track in the Paint.”

Peggy’s heart leaped. A crimson tide went over her. She shut her eyes before the accusing and indignant gaze of the matron.

So that was what the ladder had been for, and any stupid but she would have known! With dread she looked back along the porch the way she had come and there, sure enough, was a procession of marring footprints in the new grey of the flooring!

She had climbed with great difficulty over the barrier that had been deliberately placed there to prevent such a thing.

And Ditto and the other girls of the house would have to have the porch all done over on account of a silly freshman. For the girls in the invitation houses carried their own expenses, leasing their houses and then conducting them like any tenants.

“I will go ’round the back way, then,” she gasped to the glowering matron. Her one thought was to escape the baneful glare of those eyes.

Her feet stuck firmly when she tried to go and as she was lifting them up with a generous accompaniment of Macefield House paint, the door banged behind her and she was left to make her humiliating way back as she had come, with the ladder to be surmounted again, and her eyes so full of tears of embarrassment that she could hardly see to walk.

She had no intention of going around the back way. Her only desire was to get home.

She must face again the guns of the enemy—for that wonderful poem mustn’t be lost to the Monthly—but she would make her charge after she had rested once more in the trenches of Suite 22, and had equipped her army of one with a new uniform.

For that was the plan that was already taking shape in her mind. She would return in disguise. She had sallied forth in her brightest and best. Well, she would go back as meek as a freshman should, in plain clothes—and who would know she was the young stupid who had scaled the step-ladder and marred the new grey paint of the invitation house?

“Well,” said Katherine, yawning up at her lazily from the couch, when she was once more within the home walls, “how did it go, room-mate?”

“How did what go?” inquired Peggy, kicking off her pumps hastily and sliding them out of sight, under the dressing table.

“Why, the interview with the great Ditto. You make me tired, Peggy—acting just as though you were bored by the best thing that’s happened to either of us yet. And really and truly, you’re just as glad as I am for you. Admit that you are.”

“Not—so wildly,” Peggy made a little grimace, as she flung the rose-colored silk dress into a corner. A moment later her muffled voice came from the bed room, where she was fumbling among her dresses. “I never can find anything I want.”

“Are you looking for your kimono? Going to rest a while, before we get dressed for dinner? Your kimono’s under the bed, Peggy; I saw the blue edge sticking out. Hurry back in here and tell me the news; I’m consumed with curiosity.”

Peggy came back into the study, wearing a blue serge skirt, her head lost to view in a middy blouse in the process of being slipped on. She struggled to the top at last and peered out with pleading eyes.

“Will you go over there with me, Katherine?” she said in a tone she strove to make indifferent.

“Go over there with you? Haven’t you been?”

“I want your company,” Peggy stammered with difficulty, unable to tell the fib that would have been a direct answer to her room-mate’s question.

“Well,” said Katherine, getting up slowly and stretching her arms, “I should say I will.”

And so Peggy, her army reinforced, began her march on Macefield House a second time.

If Katherine was surprised at her simplified costume, she made no comment, but held her arm chummily all the way over, and Peggy felt that victory was in sight.

“Look, they’ve painted their porch,” she said in assumed surprise, when they came in sight of the fateful ladder.

“So they have,” cried Katherine, “and we can’t get up that way.”

And then she began to titter.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Peggy quickly.

“Somebody—somebody—did go up anyway,” Katherine laughed delightedly. “There are footprints all over it! Oh, mustn’t the Macefield House girls be furious?”

Peggy was silent.

“Don’t you think that’s funny?” her room-mate insisted, still laughing.

“Perfectly simple,” returned Peggy. “Some people haven’t a bit of sense. I imagine it was some—some delivery boy, don’t you?”

“More likely a freshman. Delivery boy with those little feet? How ridiculous—as if he’d wear high heels!”

“Katherine, you’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” Peggy protested.

“I believe I could ferret out the criminal,” persisted Katherine. “I’ve thought of a good clue.”

“How would you do it?” Peggy’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“Look on the bottoms of all the freshmen’s shoes for paint,” announced her friend.

“Katherine!”

“Yes?”

“Last year you and I were detectives and we found out things together, which did people good. But do you think—after our partnership then, it is right for you to go—looking things up all by yourself without me, now?”

“How perfectly silly of you,” laughed Katherine; “of course you’d have to help. You could look at the shoes of the girls on one side of the campus, and I’d take our side. Anyway it’s all in fun. I suppose we’d better go around the back way, don’t you think so?”

Peggy thought so, decidedly. In a few moments they were climbing the dark back stairs to the room of the great Monthly editor on the second floor.

The door of Number 11 stood part way open and showed a delightful and luxurious confusion within. Peggy and Katherine got a glimpse of tall red roses, Oriental couch cover, and a profusion of pillows, old bronze bric-a-brac, green leather banners, scattered books and manuscripts, with the inevitable Mona Lisa enigmatically smiling down at it all from the opposite wall of the room.

Peggy and Katherine, after a light knock, advanced into the room and seated themselves on the inviting couch.

“A book-case and a dictionary,” murmured Peggy. “Such funny things to have at college.”

“But there’s a tea table, too,” reminded Katherine. “In fact, I never saw a room that had such a varied assortment of things—and all in harmony.”

“I like that leather peacock screen,” Peggy went on.

“Oh, I love it all—but don’t you think it’s the least bit oppressive? That incense smell lulls my senses to sleep. I don’t see how Ditto can be the fresh, breezy sort she is,—perfectly matter-of-fact and everydayish,—and live in an opium den of a room like this.”

“It isn’t just what her character would lead you to expect,” admitted Peggy.

Just then, a girl drifting aimlessly by in the hall paused at the door, and glanced in curiously at the two freshmen sitting so stiffly, toes out, hands clasped in their laps, awaiting the all-important Ditto.

“Dit know you’re here?” she asked, with friendly brevity.

Both girls shook their heads.

“I’ll get her,” said the other, disappearing, and an instant later they heard, up and down the hall, the loud cry, “Dit-to! Di-i-t Armandale! Somebody to see you!”

From the third floor came a scrambling noise, then the sound of light feet tapping on the stairs.

“Well, you really did come, you children,” gasped the owner of the room, coming in flushed from her hasty descent and blowing a wavy strand of golden hair from her face.

She plumped down between them on the couch and looked from one to the other with an air of delighted proprietorship.

“And you’re beginning just right, too, as I knew you would. Thirteen is the open road to glory, here, and you certainly were courageous, handing in a poem first thing.”

Her hand reached for Peggy’s knee. “How do you like everything, now you’re here, and why haven’t you been over before?”

“We didn’t think you’d remember us,” said Peggy.

“There was so much water that day you saw us, at the picnic last year——”

Ditto threw back her head and laughed. “Yes, there was plenty of that,” she agreed. “I never saw anything so moist as you were. And you—Katherine Foster—yes, I remember your names, too,—I chose you for a friend of mine that day. And I’m positively insulted that neither of you accepted my invitation to come to see me, until I dragged you here on business. Your poem, Peggy,—here it is, I kept it out for you——”

She had risen and lifted the blue-folded paper from a pile of thick stories and “heavies” on the table. And Peggy, watching the nonchalant way she handled the sacred Monthly material, felt her admiration increasing.

“Now,” said Ditto, bending over the page with complete concentration, “let’s see just what we want to do—I thought that possibly——”

And her sturdy little blue pencil crept mercilessly through word after word, while Peggy felt the blood pounding into her face and tried not to mind the kindly criticism of her effort.

Peggy was consulted tactfully about each change and asked for suggestions, until, under the skilful guidance of the more experienced writer, the fledgling really developed a verse that would not mar the Monthly pages. Then Ditto gave her a pen and some paper to write it all out again, in the copy that was actually to go to the printer.

Katherine talked to Ditto about her room-mate, while the latter was carefully rewriting her masterpiece.

“You know you’ve got good material for freshman president, there,” said Ditto with something of senior condescension. “An Andrews girl usually has it, and she’s the right type. She isn’t very self-conscious, she’s lots of fun and ready for anything. You can tell that. Why don’t you put her up? Your elections are this week, aren’t they? Honestly, I’ve heard of nothing but Peggy Parsons, Peggy Parsons, from all the freshmen protégées of the girls in this house.”

Katherine caught fire. “It would be great,” she said. “Think of rooming with the class president. Oh, I did a clever thing in bringing her to Hampton. I can shine in reflected glory through the whole four years.”

“You do it,” urged Ditto, “get her elected, I mean. I’ll help.”

She nodded carelessly toward the huge vase of roses. “I have quite a few little freshmen friends whom I’ll—tell about Peggy.”

When Peggy handed back the poem with a rueful smile at its many changes, Katherine got up from the couch and took her room-mate’s arm. It would never do to linger, though it was hard to leave the great Presence.

Peggy’s look as they left the house held simply pleasure and gratitude, but Katherine’s brimmed with meaning.

“You don’t know what I know,” she hummed.