Betty Wales, Freshman Part 29

"No, I can't speak to her either, Ethel. You wouldn't suggest it if you knew how things are between us. But I see that you can't. Thank you just as much. No, I mustn't stop to-night."

Betty walked down the elm-shaded street lost in thought. Eleanor had declaimed upon the foolishness of coming back on time after vacations through most of the dinner hour, and Betty understood as she had not that afternoon what Dorothy meant. But now her one hope had failed her; Ethel had shown good cause why she should not act as Eleanor's adviser and Betty had no idea what to do next.

"h.e.l.lo, Betty Wales! Christy and I thought we saw you up at the golf club this afternoon." Nita Reese's room overlooked the street and she was hanging out her front window.

"I was up there," said Betty soberly, "but I had to come right back. I didn't play at all."

"Then I should say it was a waste of good time to go up," declared Nita amiably. "You'd better be on hand to-morrow. The juniors are going to be awfully hard to beat."

"I'll try," said Betty unsmilingly, and Nita withdrew her head from the window, wondering what could be the matter with her usually cheerful friend.

At the corner of Meriden Place Betty hesitated. Then, noticing that Mrs.

Chapin's piazza was full of girls, she crossed Main Street and turned into the campus, following the winding path that led away from the dwelling-houses through the apple orchard. There were seats along this path. Betty chose one on the crest of the hill, screened in by a clump of bushes and looking off toward Paradise and the hills beyond. There she sat down in the warm spring dusk to consider possibilities. And yet what was the use of bothering her head again when she had thought it all over in the afternoon? Arguments that she might have made to Ethel occurred to her now that it was too late to use them, but nothing else.

She would go back to Dorothy, explain why she could not speak to Eleanor herself, and beg her to take back the responsibility which she had unwittingly s.h.i.+fted to the wrong shoulders. She would go straight off too. She had found an invitation to a spread at the Belden house scrawled on her blotting pad at dinner time, and she might as well be over there enjoying herself as here worrying about things she could not possibly help.

As she got up from her seat she glanced at the hill that sloped off below her. It was the dust-pan coasting ground. How different it looked now in its spring greenery! Betty smiled at the memory of her mishap.

How nice Eleanor had been to her then. And Miss Ferris! If only Miss Ferris would speak to Eleanor. "Why, perhaps she will," thought Betty, suddenly remembering Miss Ferris's note. "I could ask her to, anyway.

But--she's a faculty. Well, Ethel is too, though I never thought of it."

And Dorothy had wanted Betty's help in keeping the matter out of the hands of the authorities. "But this is different," Betty decided at last. "I'm asking them not as officials, but just as awfully nice people, who know what to say better than we girls do. Miss King would think that was all right."

Without giving herself time to reconsider, Betty sped toward the Hilton house. All sorts of direful suppositions occurred to her while she waited for a maid to answer her ring. What if Miss Ferris had forgotten about writing the note, or had meant it for what Nan called "a polite nothing"? Perhaps it would be childish to speak of it anyway. Perhaps Miss Ferris would have other callers. If not, how should she tell her story?

"I ought to have taken time to think," reflected Betty, as she followed the maid down the hall to Miss Ferris's rooms.

Miss Ferris was alone; nevertheless Betty fidgeted dreadfully during the preliminary small-talk. Somebody would be sure to come in before she could get started, and she should never, never dare to come again. At the first suggestion of a pause she plunged into her business.

"Miss Ferris, I want to ask you something, but I hated to do it, so I came right along as soon as I decided that I'd better, and now I don't know how to begin."

"Just begin," advised Miss Ferris, laughing.

"That is what they say to you in theme cla.s.ses," said Betty, "but it never helped me so very much, somehow. Well, I might begin by telling you why I thought I could come to you."

"Unless you really want to tell that you might skip it," said Miss Ferris, "because I don't need to be reminded that I shall always be glad to do anything I can for my good friend Betty Wales."

"Oh, thank you! That helps a lot," said Betty gratefully, and went on with her story.

Miss Ferris listened attentively. "Miss Watson is the girl with the wonderful gray eyes and the lovely dark hair. I remember. She comes down here a great deal to see Miss Cramer, I think. It's a pity, isn't it, that she hasn't great good sense to match her beauty? So you want me to speak to her about her very foolish att.i.tude toward our college life.

Suppose I shouldn't succeed in changing her mind?"

"Oh, you would succeed," said Betty eagerly. "Mary Brooks says you can argue a person into anything."

Miss Ferris laughed again. "I'm glad Miss Brooks approves of my argumentative ability, but are you sure that Miss Watson is the sort of person with whom argument is likely to count for anything? Did you ever know her to change her mind on a subject of this sort, because her friends disapproved of her?"

Betty hesitated. "Yes--yes, I have. Excuse me for not going into particulars, Miss Ferris, but there was a thing she did when she came here that she never does now, because she found how others felt about it. Indeed, I think there are several things."

Miss Ferris nodded silently. "Then why not appeal to the same people who influenced her before?"

It was the question that Betty had been dreading, but she met it unflinchingly. "One of them thinks she has lost her influence, Miss Ferris, and another one who helped a little bit before, can't, because--I'm that one, Miss Ferris. I unintentionally did something last term that made Eleanor angry with me. It made her more dissatisfied and unhappy here too; so when I heard about this I felt as if I was a little to blame for it, and then I wanted to make up for the other time too.

But of course it is a good deal to ask of you." Betty slid forward on to the edge of her chair ready to accept a hasty dismissal.

Miss Ferris waited a moment. "I shall be very glad to do it," she said at last. "I wanted to be sure that I understood the situation and that I could run a chance of helping Miss Watson. I think I can, but you must forgive me if I make a bad matter worse. I'll ask her to have tea with me to-morrow. May I send a note by you?"

"Of course you won't tell her that I spoke to you?" asked Betty anxiously, when Miss Ferris handed her the note. Miss Ferris promised and Betty danced out into the night. Half-way home she laughed merrily all to herself.

"What's the joke?" said a girl suddenly appearing around the corner of the Main Building.

"It was on me," laughed Betty, "so you can't expect me to tell you what it was."

It had just occurred to her that, as there was no possibility of Eleanor's finding out her part in Miss Ferris's intervention, a reconciliation was as far away as ever. "She wouldn't like it if she should find out," thought Betty, "and perhaps it was just another tactless interference. Well, I'm glad I didn't think of all these things sooner, for I believe it was the right thing to do, and it was a lot easier doing it while I hoped it might bring us together, as Nan said. I wonder what kind of things Nan meant."

She dropped the note on the hall table and slipped softly up-stairs. As she sat down at her desk she looked at the clock and hesitated. It was not so late as she had thought, only quarter of nine. There was still time to go back to the Belden. But after a moment's wavering Betty began getting out of her dress and into a kimono. Since the day of the basket-ball game she had honestly tried not to let the little things interfere with the big, nor the mere "interruptions" that were fun and very little more loom too large in her scale of living. "Livy to-night and golf to-morrow," she told the green lizard, as she sat down again and went resolutely to work.

When Eleanor came in to dinner the next evening Betty could hardly conceal her excitement. Would she say anything? If she said nothing what would it mean? The interview had apparently not been a stormy one.

Eleanor looked tired, but not in the least disturbed or defiant. She ate her dinner almost in silence, answering questions politely but briefly and making none of her usual effort to control and direct the conversation. But just as the girls were ready to leave the table she broke her silence. "Wait a minute," she said. "I want to ask you please to forget all the foolish things I said last night at dinner. I've said them a good many times, and I can't contradict them to every one, but I can here--and I want to. I've thought more about it since yesterday, and I see that I hadn't at all the right idea of the situation. The students at a college are supposed to be old enough to do the right thing about vacations without the attaching of any childish penalty to the wrong thing. But we all of us get careless; then a public sentiment must be created against the wrong things, like cutting over. That was what the registrar was trying to do. Anybody who stays over as I did makes it less possible to do without rules and regulations and penalties--in other words hurts the tone of the college, just as a man who likes to live in a town where there are churches but never goes to them himself, unfairly throws the responsibility of church-going on to the rest of the community. I hadn't thought of it in that way; I didn't mean to be a s.h.i.+rk, but I was one."

A profound silence greeted Eleanor's argument. Mary Rich, who had been loud in her champions.h.i.+p of Eleanor's sentiments the night before, looked angry at this sudden desertion; and Mary Brooks tried rather unsuccessfully not to smile. The rest were merely astonished at so sudden a change of mind. Finally Betty gave a little nervous cough and in sheer desperation began to talk. "That's a good enough argument to change any one's mind," she said. "Isn't it queer how many different views of a subject there are?"

"Of some subjects," said Eleanor pointedly.

It was exactly what Betty should have expected, but she couldn't help being a little disappointed. Eleanor had just shown herself so fine and downright, so willing to make all the reparation in her power for a course whose inconsistency had been proved to her. It was very disheartening to find that she cherished the old, reasonless grudge as warmly as ever. But if Betty had accomplished nothing for herself, she had done all that she hoped for Eleanor, and she tried to feel perfectly satisfied.

"I think too much about myself, anyway," she told the green lizard, who was the recipient of many confidences about this time.

The rest of the month sped by like the wind. As Betty thought it over afterward, it seemed to have been mostly golf practice and bird club.

Roberta organized the bird club. Its object, according to her, was to a.s.sist Mary Brooks with her zoology by finding bird haunts and conveying Mary to them; its ultimate development almost wrought Mary's ruin. Mary had elected a certain one year course in zoology on the supposition that one year, general courses are usually "snaps," and the further theory that every well conducted student will have one "snap" on her schedule.

These propositions worked well together until the spring term, when zoology 1a resolved itself into a bird-study cla.s.s. Mary, who was near-sighted, detested bird-study, and hardly knew a crow from a kinglet, found life a burden, until Roberta, who loved birds and was only too glad to get a companion on her walks in search of them, organized what she picturesquely named "the Mary-bird club." Rachel and Adelaide immediately applied for admission, and about the time that Mary appropriated the forget-me-nots that Katherine had gathered for Marion Lawrence and wore them to a dance on the plea that they exactly matched her evening dress, and also decoyed Betty into betraying her connection with the freshman grind-book, Katherine and Betty joined. They seldom accompanied the club on its official walks, preferring to stroll off by themselves and come back with descriptions of the birds they had seen for Mary and Roberta to identify. Occasionally they met a friendly bird student who helped them with their identifications on the spot, and then, when Roberta was busy, they would take Mary out in search of "their birds," as they called them. Oddly enough they always found these rare species a second time, though Mary, because of her near-sightedness, had to be content with a casual glance at them.

"But what you've seen, you've seen," she said. "I've got to see fifty birds before June 1st; that doesn't necessarily mean see them so you'll know them again. Now I shouldn't know the nestle or the shelcuff, but I can put them down, can't I?"

"Of course," a.s.sented Katherine, "a few rare birds like those will make your list look like something."

The pink-headed euthuma, which came to light on the very last day of May, interested Mary so much that she told Roberta about it immediately and Roberta questioned the discoverers. Their accounts were perfectly consistent.

"Way out on Paradise path, almost to the end, we met a man das.h.i.+ng around as if he were crazy," explained Betty. "We should have thought he was an escaped lunatic if we hadn't seen others like him."

"Yes," continued Katherine. "But he acted too much like you to take us in. So we said we were interested in birds too, and he danced around some more and said we had come upon a rare specimen. Then he pointed to the top of an enormous pine-tree----"

"Those rare birds are always in the very tops of trees," put in Mary eagerly.

"Of course; that's one reason they're rare," went on Betty. "But that minute it flew into the top of a poplar, and we three pursued it. It was a beauty."

"And then you came back after me, and it was still there. Tell her how it was marked," suggested Mary. "Perhaps she knows it under some other name."

"It had a pink head, of course," said Katherine, "and blue wings."

"Goodness!" exclaimed Roberta suspiciously.

"Don't you mean black wings, Katherine?" asked Betty hastily.