Betty Wales, Junior: A Story for Girls

It was a week after the “prom.;” all the men had gone home, and all the violets had faded, before anything else of particular interest took place. Mary Brooks, to be sure, had been going about wearing her preoccupied, important air and had declined various invitations on the plea that she was busy; but nobody thought anything of that, because Mary was always having periods of strenuous and conscientious effort, surrounded on all sides, as Katherine Kittredge put it, by periods of the exact opposite.

Nearly all the “literary” juniors, together with a good many like Betty Wales who were not in the least literary, took Miss Raymond’s theme course. The bulletin boards were just outside the door of her recitation room, so that part of the hall was always noisy and crowded between classes; and at the close of the hour on this particular Wednesday morning there seemed to be even more confusion there than usual. But the class paid very little heed to what was going on outside. Miss Raymond had a way of bringing up interesting points that the recitation period was much too short to dispose of, and they sauntered out in this usual leisurely fashion, arguing about the merits of the theme that had just been read—a spirited essay of Eleanor Watson’s. Helen Adams happened to be the last one in the line, and at Miss Raymond’s desk she stopped to ask a question.

“Miss Raymond, could you tell me——” she began timidly. Just then a tumult of cries and a burst of gay applause came through the half-open door.

“Aren’t they noisy this morning?” laughed Helen. “And it’s not Monday, so it can’t be about a society election.”

Miss Raymond was gathering up her books and papers. “Go out and see what it’s about,” she said, smiling down at Helen’s eager little face.

“Yes, but I just wanted to ask——” began Helen again.

Miss Raymond gave her a little push in the direction of the door. “Never mind that now,” she said. “You belong out there.”

And Helen went out, wondering at Miss Raymond’s insistence, into the tightly packed, swaying mob of laughing, excited girls, who all seemed to know what the noise and the merriment were about. As Helen pushed through the door, a girl whom she did not know stretched out a hand to her.

“Congratulations, Miss Adams,” she said.

Helen looked her bewilderment, and the girl laughed.

“Your note is on the bulletin board,” she said. “Didn’t Miss Raymond tell you?”

Just then a movement of the crowd tossed Christy Mason forward toward Helen. Evidently Christy had something to do with the excitement. People were shaking hands with her, and her face was radiant.

“Who else got one?” Helen heard her ask the girls around her.

“Marion Lustig,” somebody told her, “and Emily Davis. I don’t know who else. One of the notes is still up there on the bulletin board.”

“Oh, Miss Mason,” cried Helen, “what is it that you are, please?”

“Why I seem to be an editor of the ‘Argus,’” laughed Christy. “Business manager, I think the note says. Isn’t it splendid—only I don’t see how it ever came to me.”

Helen’s face flushed red, and then she got white and faint and entirely forgot to congratulate Christy, who was much too happy to notice the omission. Could it be that she was an editor? Was that what the girl near the door had meant? Oh, she must have been mistaken! Helen looked despairingly at the bulletin board with the surging crowd of girls between it and her. It seemed as if she couldn’t wait—as if she must know at once whether or not there was anything there for her.

Just then a voice cried, “Pass this to Miss Adams. She’s standing by the door there, and she can’t get through the jam.“ In a moment another girl whom Helen didn’t know, but who seemed to know her perfectly, slipped something into her hand.

“I hope you’ll enjoy the work as much as I have,” the stranger said, shaking hands vigorously, “and I know you’ll do it much better.”

Then Helen found herself suddenly a vortex about which the crowd eddied and swarmed as it had swarmed about Christy, shaking hands, congratulating, complimenting.

“But of course, it’s no surprise to you,” one girl said. “We were sure you’d get it.”

Helen only stared at her in blank amazement.

“Why, I never dreamed of such a thing,” she told Betty a little later when the hall had cleared and only the editors who did not have a class the next hour and a few of their best friends were left. “Why, Betty Wales, just think! I’m—I’m an editor of the ‘Argus.’”

“Exactly,” laughed Betty. “What does the note say, Helen?”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Helen. “I haven’t had time to open it.” She looked at it doubtfully. “Betty, suppose there should be some mistake. Suppose the note is about something else.”

“It isn’t,” Betty assured her. “I heard Mary Brooks say you were an editor, and of course she knows.”

Thus encouraged Helen opened her note and read through its glorious contents. “Betty,” she said solemnly, passing it to her to read, “I don’t believe anybody was ever quite so happy as I am.”

“Except the other editors,” suggested Betty teasingly.

Helen shook her head. “I don’t believe one of them cares as much as I do. Who are the others, Betty?”

“Marion Lustig and Emily Davis and Christy and Jane Drew and—let me see——”

“And Eleanor of course,” put in Helen.

Betty shook her head. “No,” she said, “Eleanor wasn’t one.”

Helen looked perplexed. “I don’t see why. She writes better than any one in the class except Marion Lustig. Why hasn’t the ‘Argus’ printed any of her things this year, Betty?”

“She didn’t want them printed, I think, for one reason,” said Betty. “And doesn’t an editor have to do other things besides write? Perhaps Eleanor isn’t fitted for it in other ways.”

With that she escaped to the library. She had caught just a glimpse of Eleanor in the crowd and seen the hunted look that came to her face when somebody of Helen’s opinion said, “Of course you’re on the board, Miss Watson.”

“I wanted to choke her,” Betty reflected, “but I suppose she wasn’t to blame for not having listened to unpleasant gossip. Poor Eleanor! It’s going to be a hard day for her!”

Meanwhile little Helen Adams went blissfully home to the Belden. Several times on the way she pinched herself to make sure she was awake. Up in her own room in the quiet of the big empty house she sat down to think it all over. She had been very lonely during her freshman year—but that didn’t matter now. And the basket-ball song and the verses and the quaint little essay on apple-trees that the “Argus” had printed had meant long hours of hard work and discouraged waiting for the right words to come. But the struggles and discouragements didn’t matter now either, in the face of this glorious, wholly unlooked-for success.

Helen would have been amazed indeed if she could have heard Jean Eastman’s view of her position.

“Yes, I’m sorry for her,” Jean informed the Westcott House lunch table. “I think she’d have been happier without this. She won’t fit in with the others. They’ve all been prominent girls ever since freshman year, and she—oh, of course, she has some nice friends, but only the ones she was thrown with at Mrs. Chapin’s and some freshmen she met through her roommate. She isn’t in Dramatic Club or Clio, and she’s never had any office in the class. She’ll feel the difference now, and realize how she’s been left out from everything else.”

“Do you think so? Now I can’t imagine anything more exciting than to be a ‘dark horse,’” volunteered a bright-eyed little sophomore at the end of the table. “Why, everybody is talking about her to-day. ‘Who’s Helen Adams?’ That’s what they all want to know. It must be splendid to take people by surprise and just make them find out about you.”

“That sounds well,” persisted Jean, “but in actual fact it’s a different matter. You get the place that everybody thought belonged to some one else”—here Jean had the grace to look a little uncomfortable, for her friends had frequently assured her that she stood as good a chance as anybody for a minor position on the editorial staff—“but you miss the fun of it. You don’t get the flowers and the spreads and all that sort of thing that the popular girls will have.”

“Well, anyway Miss Adams isn’t going to miss the spread,” said the bright-eyed sophomore.

“Who’s going to give it for her?” demanded Jean.

“Miss Watson.”

Jean laughed disagreeably. “Indeed! One of Eleanor’s quixotic philanthropies, I suppose.” She lowered her voice so that only the little crowd of juniors near her could hear. “Wouldn’t you think that to-day of all days she’d have preferred to keep in the background? But I suppose she thought that she might as well be ‘in it’ one way if she couldn’t the other.”

At first Eleanor’s impulse had been just what Jean had suggested. She wanted to get into the background, away from the noisy demonstrations and the curious or idle inquiries about her omission from the “Argus” board. Ever since she entered college, fully informed by her upper class friends about all the ways of putting oneself forward and all the offices and honors that a clever girl might aspire to, Eleanor had looked forward to the day of the “Argus” elections as her hour of greatest triumph. Now Emily Davis had the place that might have been hers, and she was slinking home by a back path, hoping to avoid meeting any one. She looked across the greening campus and saw little Helen Adams also hurrying home. Her lips curled scornfully as she watched Helen’s joyous progress, for to her as to Jean this late hard-won recognition would have had in it more humiliation than triumph. Then all at once her face softened as the idea of the supper came to her.

“I don’t believe any one else, except possibly Betty, will think of it,” she decided swiftly, “and perhaps it would please Helen more if I should do it. Coming from some one outside her special friends, it will seem like a more general recognition.”

At the door of Helen’s room she hesitated and drew back to consider. All the editors would be at Cuyler’s that evening with parties of their friends. Everybody who saw her would either remember why she was not an editor or wonder what the mysterious reason could be.

AT THE DOOR OF HELEN’S ROOM SHE HESITATED

“I might wait until to-morrow,” she thought. “There would be fewer people then, and I shouldn’t be so conspicuous.”

But no; to-night was the proper night for an editorial spread, and Helen should have the fun of being in the midst of things for once.

So she knocked and explained her errand. Helen’s ecstasy of delight was almost pathetic.

“A supper at Cuyler’s for me!” she cried. “Oh, how lovely! How perfectly lovely! Betty has ordered some flowers for me, and now you do this! I haven’t anything left to wish for. I’m sure I shall enjoy my one big day as much as girls like you and Betty enjoy all yours put together.”

“I hope you will,” said Eleanor, thinking bitterly of the “big day,” when her story came out in the “Argus.”

“And I think it is particularly nice of you,” went on Helen, earnestly, “when we all thought——” The look on Eleanor’s face warned her not to go on, and instead of finishing her sentence she put her arms around Eleanor and stood on tiptoe to kiss her soft cheek.

Some of “The Merry Hearts” had already accepted invitations to other spreads, but two of the B’s were free and received Eleanor’s timidly proffered invitation with a heartiness that surprised her and encouraged her beyond measure to go on in the difficult rôle she had chosen. Katherine could come, and Roberta. Betty excused herself to Nita, who was entertaining in honor of Christy, on the plea that Helen would feel hurt if her freshman roommate could not come to her spread, and Lucile declared that she was almost as “set up” by being invited to a junior party as Helen was by being elected editor. So every one was in the best of spirits and the “dark horse spread,” as Jean called it, was the gayest of all the editorial celebrations.

All the parties broke up at about the same time, and went up the hill to the campus in a long, straggling line. Without any particular manœuvering “The Merry Hearts” found themselves together in the rear, with no outsiders in their midst but Eleanor. At the campus gate Bob stopped the tail of the procession.

“Just wait a minute, girls,” she said. “Mary, I want to call a meeting of ‘The Merry Hearts.’”

“All right,” said Mary, taking her place under the gate lantern. “It’s called. What is the business?”

Eleanor had drawn off to one side, uncertain whether it would be more tactful to go or stay.

“Just to elect Eleanor Watson a member,” announced Bob, calmly. “Don’t go, Eleanor. I’ve sounded them all, and they all want you. This is only a formality.”

The formality was quickly disposed of after the very informal fashion of the society, and Eleanor found herself wearing Babe’s cherished pin and having the objects and rules of the society explained to her by Babbie Hildreth and Nita Reese, who had been her most implacable critics.

“Yes, we changed our minds,” Bob was meanwhile explaining to Madeline, whom she had pulled back to a safe distance for confidences. “We felt pretty mean the night of the prom., and to-day I told Babe that anybody who was generous enough, after everything, to give Helen Chase Adams a spread, and brave enough to face it out down there at Cuyler’s,—well, that for all that she deserved something in place of what she didn’t get. I hope she was pleased.”

Alone in her room a little later Eleanor caught sight of her happy face in a mirror, and laughed at herself for being so absurdly pleased about such a little thing. “But after all it isn’t such a very little thing,” she reflected. “It means that they’re beginning to trust me again, and that’s at the bottom of everything.”

But the happiest person in Harding College that night was Betty Wales.

“Everything is getting fixed,” she told the green lizard joyously. “Eleanor is a ‘Merry Heart’ and Helen is an editor. It does seem as if there was nothing more left to bother about.” The ten o’clock gong sounded ominously through the halls and Betty jumped for her light. “There is always the ten o’clock rule,” she sighed, and then she laughed. “I wouldn’t bother about things for anything,” she said as she tumbled wearily into bed.