Betty Wales decides

Betty Wales always insisted that the O’Tooles’ visit had nothing whatever to do with her decision to go back to Harding.

“I see through you, Mademoiselle,” Will teased her. “You think you’ll be getting ready to be married about next year, and you’re taking your last chance to say a long farewell to your beloved Harding,—also to save your three-decker, secretary-tutor-tea-shop salary for a grand and elegant trousseau.”

“Will Wales——” began Betty fiercely, and then relapsed into haughty silence (accompanied by the faintest blush) as the only proper treatment of such unfounded accusations.

Nan was amused, and Dorothy relieved, of course, that her favorite sister was to be within call again. At first Mr. Wales agreed, rather soberly, that it would be foolish to neglect such good opportunities; but before she left home Betty had made him laugh so heartily at a few of her pet business theories, mostly adapted from Mary Brooks Hinsdale’s Rules for the Perfect Tea-Shop, that he accepted her decision as a huge joke—just another of Betty’s whims, having no painful connection with the ebb of the family fortunes.

But Mother, with the illogical perversity that is proverbially feminine, took the amazing position, for her, of Marie O’Toole’s ardent defender and champion.

“If you’re not going back chiefly on that poor child’s account,” she told her daughter Betty, “why, I’m ashamed of your unsympathetic nature. I never was so sorry for any one”—she had been present on the occasion of the O’Tooles’ second call. “She’s so sweet and pretty,—and so ignorant of all the things that other sweet, pretty girls learn from their mothers. She must know how strangely Mrs. O’Toole strikes nice people, but she doesn’t act annoyed or embarrassed, or try to keep her mother from making those dreadful remarks. Mrs. O’Toole says that they have never been separated, and that she doesn’t know how she can live next winter without Marie.”

“Betty thinks they can safely prepare for a grand family reunion after mid-years,” laughed Will.

“And then,” explained Betty practically, “I can have time enough to do justice to Morton Hall and”—very mysteriously—“to a lovely new plan that I have for the Tally-ho. Of course, as long as I’m going back anyhow, I won’t be mean enough not to ‘undertake’ Marie. But I hate having a lot of entirely different things to be responsible for, and I specially hate tutoring. I only hope this girl won’t cry all the time the way Eugenia Ford used to. It was fearfully embarrassing.”

“Tom Benson advises you to make her join an anti-flirt society first off,” Will put in solemnly. “He says it’s lucky Harding isn’t a co-educational college, because in that case it would take about two able-bodied chaperons to look after the gay Miss O’Toole.”

“Tell Tom Benson from me that I’m glad he’s at Yale instead of Winstead,” Betty retorted loftily. “A girl who wants to go to Harding badly enough to study all summer, take two sets of exams, and enter with three conditions hanging over her, isn’t as silly as Tom Benson seems to think.”

“Certainly not,” Mother defended her oddly-chosen favorite. “President Wallace must have seen her possibilities, or he wouldn’t have asked Betty to help her out. He evidently feels just as I do about her. I am sure that she has a naturally fine mind, and that she will respond very quickly to the cultivated atmosphere of the college. I doubt if Betty will need to do more than give her the most casual sort of instruction.”

Betty smiled to herself in the sheltering darkness of the piazza, where the family was spending the evening. Her private opinion coincided closely with Tom Benson’s, to the effect that even without the complications of co-education, Marie would be “a handful.” But President Wallace had hinted that he had a good reason which he was “not yet at liberty to communicate” for asking Betty to try to get Marie creditably through her freshman year; and, as Betty put it briefly to herself, it would be mean, just because it meant hard work, to refuse to do what the tragi-comical O’Tooles had set their hearts on.

So that matter was settled. The Students’ Aid work had developed so rapidly that Betty had petitioned for a senior assistant, and also, to the vast amusement of the Association’s managers, for a smaller salary for herself. Betty was bent on securing enough leisure to carry out her “lovely new plan” for the Tally-ho. Jim Watson may have had something to do with her feeling, or he may not; but, for one reason or another, Betty had what Madeline Ayres called a “leading” that this would be her last chance at Harding; and she wanted to “finish out” the Tally-ho, partly because she wished Mr. Morton to feel fully justified in his purchase and improvement of the property, but chiefly just to satisfy her own queer little sense of the fitness of things. The Tally-ho was capable of more than had ever yet been developed; and Betty liked people and institutions to do their very most and best. But the details of all this planning were kept a grand secret, even from the Smallest Sister, who had been the “Co.” in the Betty Wales business firm. Betty wanted to look over the situation at Harding first; then she would be ready to confide her conclusions to Co., Babbie and Madeline.

Betty Wales went back to Harding three days before the college opened, in order to get a good start with her work. But almost before she had stepped off the train she found herself up to her neck in a deluge of Students’ Aid affairs, all marked “immediate,” at least in the minds of the persons most concerned. It was a large factor in Betty’s success that she could always get the other person’s point of view; but there are occasions when this trait makes its possessor very uncomfortable. Betty wanted every girl who had applied for the Association’s help to get it, if she was worthy; she wanted every lonely freshman to be met at her train, every boarding-house keeper in search of waitresses, and every well-to-do student who hated to do her own mending, to feel that nobody could supply their varied wants so well as the Students’ Aid. The result was that one small secretary was shamefully overworked, almost forgot that she was supposed to be helping to run the most successful tea-room in Harding, and had no time to spend in worry over the probable bothers connected with tutoring Miss Marie O’Toole.

President Wallace was of course infinitely busier than Betty; all he had found time to do about Marie was to tell Betty, with a twinkle, that he had perfect confidence in her ability to manage “even the extraordinary product of a mining camp, a convent in Utah, a Select School for Wealthy American Girls in Paris, and the companionship of Mrs. James O’Toole; and to transform said product into a freshman that should be a real credit to Harding College.”

Whereupon Betty had gasped at the complicated things that were expected of her, laughed because President Wallace was laughing and seemed to expect that of her too, and then hurried off to find Miss Ferris and ask her if Mary Jones, the senior who lived in an attic at the other end of High Street, couldn’t somehow be persuaded to pocket her pride and come to fill an unexpected vacancy in Morton Hall.

She painstakingly met the train that Marie had written she would take; though either Marie had missed that train or Betty missed Marie. But with the capable assistance of Mary Brooks Hinsdale and Helen Adams she found Rachel and Christy, and Georgia Ames and Eugenia Ford found her. And the six of them, declaring that she looked tired to death and almost, if not quite, starved, bore her off to the Tally-ho for refreshment.

“Which is the biggest, most comfy chair you’ve got, Nora?” demanded Mary. “Bring us tea and the best little cakes you have for seven.”

“Better make it for fourteen, Nora,” amended Georgia. “I’m fairly hungry.”

And while the seven ate for fourteen, they all talked at once of “wonderful” vacations, “dandy” trips, “thrilling” summer adventures, each story ending with a rapturous, “And now aren’t we having a grand time here?”

“I must go and find that freshman,” Betty declared at last. She had said the same thing before, but this time she meant it.

“No, you mustn’t,” Georgia told her firmly, tumbling little Eugenia into her lap as a precaution against sudden flight. “You must tell me where she boards, and I’ll go and dry her tears, help her to unpack, explain about morning chapel and freshman class assembly, and tell her to meet you in—let me see—oh, the note-room in the basement of College Hall, at eleven o’clock sharp. She’s sure to be through by that time, and if you’re busy then, why, she can just wait for you.”

Betty listened to Georgia’s program in obvious relief. “Oh, Georgia, would you really do all that? You’re an angel! With so many other things on my mind, having to hunt her up seems like the very last straw. But Georgia—she’s—rather queer—not like other girls, I mean. She’s lived abroad a lot and her mother is—peculiar.” Betty tried to forewarn Georgia without prejudicing the company against the absent Marie.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” Mary Brooks Hinsdale reassured her. “Georgia will manage your freshman. Miss Ames, I hereby rechristen you Georgia-to-the-Rescue, and elect you to take extra-special care of our precious Betty Wales.”

Georgia blushed very red at being praised and “elected” to a mission by the charming Mrs. Hinsdale. “I don’t care how queer Miss O’Toole is,” she declared stoutly. “I guess I can make her understand a few simple messages. I’ve wanted to see the inside of that elegant new freshman hotel-affair where she’s staying. Go to bed early, and get rested, Betty dear.”

When the college clock began to strike eleven the next morning Betty reached for her rain-coat—the freshman downpour had duly arrived—to run over to College Hall and keep her appointment with Marie. But she had pulled on one sleeve, when Miss Ferris appeared to say that she had interviewed Mary Jones, who lived at the other end of High Street, and had persuaded her—it took fifteen minutes to tell what. Just outside Betty’s door Miss Ferris encountered Georgia Ames, red and panting. Georgia skilfully avoided a collision, slipped inside Betty’s office before the door had fairly closed upon the departing Miss Ferris, and dropped, breathless, into a chair.

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten your freshman,” she panted. “So I came to remind you. Don’t know why I hurried so. Only—she is entertaining the whole note-room, and it’s full of girls, and she is just screamingly funny, Betty, though I shouldn’t say so to any one else. But some of the other girls will pass on her choice remarks—the grind book will be full of her. And I couldn’t help liking her last night, so I thought I’d better come and remind you.” Georgia paused awkwardly.

“You know she just happens to be my freshman,” Betty explained smilingly. “I was asked to tutor her and look out for her a little. I liked her too, the little I’ve seen of her.” Betty had slipped on her rain-coat while they talked. “Come and help me find her, Georgia-dear-to-the-Rescue.”

The note-room is a notable Harding institution, time-honored and hedged about with inviolable customs. It gets its name from the four letter-racks, one for each class, that cover the long wall opposite the windows. The other walls are patched with Lost and Found and Want signs, and with notices of class and society meetings. A long table runs almost the length of the narrow room. On Mondays the janitor piles upon it the week’s accumulation of dropped handkerchiefs, for their owners to claim and carry off. On other days college celebrities may sit on it, swinging their feet comfortably while they beam on their admirers or wait to keep a “date” with one of their “little pals.” It is unwritten law that no freshmen save only the president, vice-president, and Students’ Council member may sit, or even lean, on the note-room table.

The note-room is always crowded between classes, and on this first disorganized, rainy morning it was a favorite rendezvous. As Betty and Georgia wormed a slow passage through the crowd near the door, they could see Miss Marie O’Toole, dressed, quite without regard for the weather, in a furbelowed silk gown, a huge be-flowered hat, and—of all things at Harding!—gloves, perched comfortably on the sacred table, between Fluffy Dutton and a clever little sophomore named Susanna Hart. Fluffy was all smiles and attention; Susanna’s black eyes twinkled with suppressed glee. Around the table surged a mob of girls, all amused but the freshmen, who were deeply and seriously interested in what was going on.

“Yes, I think I shall like it here,” Marie was saying in her sweet, piercing voice. “It’s so friendly and informal—not a bit like Miss Mallon’s Select School ‘pour les Americaines’ in dear old Paree. I’ve talked to lots of nice girls this morning. I can’t remember half their names, but they nearly all promised to call on me. You will too, won’t you?” She beamed impartially on Fluffy and Susanna.

“Maybe, if we have time. Got a crush yet?” inquired Fluffy sweetly.

“A what?” Marie’s face was blank.

Fluffy explained.

Marie giggled consciously. “You embarrass me, Miss Dutton. You go off and stand in a corner of the hall for a minute, and I’ll tell the rest of these girls whether I’ve got a crush or not,—and what her name is.”

Fluffy slipped obediently off the table, and then pulled the amazed Marie roughly after her. “Freshmen aren’t allowed on this table,” she announced sternly. “You’d better go home and read the rules of this college. There’s a rule about crushes, too. And about asking upper-class girls to call.” Then tender-hearted Fluffy relented and held out her hand. “I must go now,” she said. “But it won’t be against the rules for me to call on you, and I will. Where do you live?”

Marie explained, her gaiety somewhat subdued. Just then she caught sight of Betty and Georgia, who had at last succeeded in getting somewhere near the sacred table.

“Oh, Miss Wales,” she cried eagerly. “Here I am, and I need your help right away. Where can I find a set of the college rules—about calls, and crushes, and sitting on tables like this one, and so on?”

“And passing exams in freshman math.,” murmured Fluffy wickedly, hazarding a guess that Marie’s brain was not of the exact, scientific variety. “How do you do, Betty? I’m coming to the Tally-ho for tea and a talk to-night—Straight too. You’ll be there?”

Betty said yes, trying to look properly reproachful and not succeeding at all. Meanwhile the crowd had drawn back, old girls having whispered to the gaping freshmen that Miss Wales was a “near-faculty.”

“Shall we come over to my office?” Betty suggested, nodding right and left to girls she recognized. Marie covered her silken elegance with a natty white polo coat, and thoughtfully insisted on carrying the umbrella over Betty on the way back to her office.

“Just look at that, Miss Wales,” she began, as soon as they were seated, handing Betty a printed list of the accepted freshman candidates. “I’m in. I wouldn’t believe it till I saw it down in black and white. And I’m the only O in a class of two hundred. Isn’t that funny, Miss Wales?”

Betty looked sympathetically at the name of the only O in the freshman class. There it was, down in black and white: Montana Marie O’Toole.

“Oh, how f——” began Betty, who was fast being overwhelmed by the accumulating absurdities of her protégée. “Why, I—I thought Marie was your first name.”

Marie giggled. “I’m always called Marie—now. Ma would be awfully mad if she saw that ridiculous old Montana cropping out again. But they told us, when I took my first exams, to put down our full names. I asked if ‘M. Marie’ wouldn’t do, and the teacher in charge of the room just glared at me; so of course I wrote it all out in full about as quick as I could. You see, Miss Wales, I was born in a mining camp, and Pa named me after the claim where he’d struck it rich the very day I came into the world. The Montana Mary it was called. When I went to Salt Lake to school I dropped the Montana, and when I went to Paris I changed Mary to Marie. Marie suits me better, don’t you think so, Miss Wales?”

Marie got up to shed her heavy polo coat, and stood, a dazzlingly pretty vision, smiling down at Betty with the half-pleading, half-commanding curve of her lips that made her so winning in spite of her crudities.

Betty smiled back at her. “You’ll be Montana Marie as long as you stay here,” she told her freshman. “So you’d better make up your mind to it. The girls always seize upon a queer name and use it. If you’d written just Marie, you might have been nicknamed something funny; so it would come to the same thing in the end. Now may I tell you a few things, please?”

Betty repeated sister Nan’s suggestions to her when she was a freshman about not making friends too hastily. Then she arranged hours for special lessons, helped Marie with her schedule of classes, answered her frank queries about the desirability of being friends with Georgia Ames and Fluffy Dutton. Then she rushed off to settle the complicated case of Mary Jones, who lived at the other end of High Street, ate a hasty luncheon, held a lengthy conference with the Morton Hall matron, who had not the least idea how to hurry through her business, made a friendly call on “the Thorn,” a student who had given some trouble the last year, and whose mother had died during the summer. And finally Betty turned up, fresh and smiling, at the Tally-ho in time to take Emily’s place at the desk, while that young lady combined a marketing expedition with a drive behind Mary’s new thoroughbred.

At five Fluffy and Straight appeared and ordered tea at a table drawn sociably near to Betty’s desk.

“Please notice our senior dignity,” observed Straight. “We’re not going to be so harum-scarum any longer.”

“I noticed Fluffy’s senior dignity this morning,” Betty told them with a twinkle.

The two exchanged significant glances and then made a simultaneous rush for Betty’s desk, which they leaned over sociably, in the unmistakable attitude of those having confidential information to discuss.

“Please tell us if her name is really Montana Marie,” began Straight abruptly.

“And how you happen to have her under your wing,” added Fluffy.

“And then we promise to be very nice to her,” concluded Straight. “Besides, Fluffy says that she likes her.”

“We’ll be very nice to her anyway, if you want us to, Betty,” Fluffy explained sweetly. “But we’re just bursting to know about her and her beautiful name.”

“Just can’t put our minds on anything else,” murmured Straight sadly. “And I can’t afford to risk a mess of warnings this year after all the trouble I had with logic when I was a junior.”

“In short,” concluded Fluffy impressively, “Montana Marie O’Toole is the sensation of the hour at Harding College. Do you ask me to prove it? Watch the Dutton twins forget their cakes and tea while they talk about her.”