Betty Wales on the campus

The two weeks after college opened were the most confused, crowded, delightful, and difficult ones that Betty Wales had ever lived through. There seemed to be twice as many freshmen as there had ever been in Harding before. The town swarmed with them and with their proud and anxious fathers and mothers and sisters and aunts. They fell upon the Tally-ho Tea-Shop with such ardor that Emily was in despair—or would have been if Betty hadn’t assumed charge of the dinner hour herself and adroitly impressed Madeline with the literary value of seeing life from the cashier’s desk at lunch time.

Miss Dick’s school opened a fortnight after Harding, and then there was Dorothy to meet—the Bensons had brought her east with them on their way to New York—and the little girl was to be established this time in the boarding department, to the arrangements of which she immediately took a perverse dislike. Considering that she was the youngest boarder and the pet and darling of the whole school, this seemed quite unreasonable, particularly as all the year before she had teased to be a “boarder.” But Eugenia Ford took most of this worry off Betty’s hands, getting up early every morning to go over for a before-breakfast story, told while she combed out the Smallest Sister’s tangled curls, and never forgetting to appear in the evening at the exactly right minute to deliver a good-night kiss.

“Don’t thank me, please,” she begged Betty imploringly. “Feeling as if I had to do it makes her seem a little more like my very own. Just think!” Eugenia’s eyes filled, but she went on bravely. “I might be doing it for my very own little sister, if a dreadful French ‘bonne’ hadn’t been careless about a cold she took. How can mothers ever care more about having dinner parties and dances and going to the opera, Miss Wales, than about playing with their babies and seeing that they’re all right? My mother is like Peter Pan, I think. She will never grow up. And she never liked dolls when she was little, so naturally she didn’t care to play with us.” Eugenia flushed, suddenly realizing that she was indulging in rather strange confidences. “My mother is a great beauty, Miss Wales, and awfully bright and entertaining. I’m very, very proud of her. And if Dorothy is the least bit sick or tired or unhappy on a day when you don’t see her, I’ll be sure to notice and tell you, so you can feel perfectly safe.”

Of course the greatest problem, and one that nobody but Betty could do much to cope with, was the launching of the secretaryship. The secretary had been provided with a cozy little office, very businesslike with its roller-topped desk, a big filing cabinet, and a typewriter stand, tucked away in a corner of the Main Building; but beyond that the trustful directors apparently expected her to shift for herself. Betty promptly interviewed the two faculty members of the board, who smiled at her eagerness and anxiety to please, and advised her not to be in a hurry, but to begin with the obvious routine work—that meant interviewing and investigating the needs and the deserts of the girls who had applied for loans from the Student’s Aid—and to branch out gradually later, as opportunity offered.

“But I can’t do just that,” Betty told the second B. C. A. tea-drinking, “because it’s no more than they did themselves before they had a secretary. It would be like stealing to take their money for just that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” advised Madeline lazily. “If they want to make it a snap course, isn’t that entirely their affair?”

“Why, Madeline Ayres,” objected Helen Adams solemnly, “it’s a charitable enterprise. I don’t suppose snap courses are exactly wrong, though they never amount to much, and so they waste the time of the ones that take them. But it would be positively wrong for the Student’s Aid to waste its money, when so many more poor girls want educations than can have them.”

Madeline listened, frowning intently. “‘The Immorality of the Snap Course’—I’ll do a little essay on that for the alumnæ department of the ‘Argus.’ It will rattle the editor awfully, but she will almost have to print it, after having teased and teased me for a few words from my facile and distinguished pen. Thanks a lot, Helen, for the idea. I’d give you the credit in a foot-note, only it might scare girls away from your courses.”

“Aren’t you thankful, girls,” began Mary, waving her teacup majestically around the circle, “that only one of us is a literary light? I wonder if real authors are as everlastingly given to changing the subject back to their own affairs as is our beloved Madeline. Now let’s get down to business——”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Madeline. “Little Mary will now voice her own and George Garrison Hinsdale’s sentiments on the immorality of the snap course. Lend me a pencil, somebody, so I can take notes of her valued ideas.”

“The business,” continued Mary, scornfully ignoring the interruption, “is to find more work for Betty, so she can earn her munificent salary properly. The meeting is now open for suggestions.”

“Well, Mary, fire away,” ordered Madeline briskly. “Of course a person with your head for business is simply overflowing with brilliant thoughts.”

“You think you’re being sarcastic, but just the same,” declared Mary modestly, “I have got a head for business——”

“Witness the way you used to make your accounts balance when you were in college, and the way your allowance lasted,” put in Rachel laughingly.

Mary smiled reminiscently. “My dear Rachel, a head for business is entirely different from being able to remember what you’ve spent. And even if I remembered, I couldn’t add it all up. But that’s bookkeeping, not business. As for using up my allowance ahead of time, I’m naturally an expansionist, and where would any respectable business be, may I ask you, if it didn’t go out every now and then and get more capital to expand with? I expanded the possibilities of the Harding course, and my father paid the bills; unfortunately there are always bills,” concluded Mary with a sigh.

“Do you still finish your allowance on the fourth of the month?” demanded Christy.

Mary shook her pretty head smilingly. “Never—for the good and sufficient reason that George Garrison Hinsdale understands me too well to give me an allowance.”

“The business of this meeting,” chanted Madeline sonorously, “is not, as you might suppose, a discussion of little Mary’s domestic and financial affairs.”

“Well, the girls asked me questions,” declared Mary indignantly, “and I didn’t know that there was any such awful rush. I’m not trying to gain time while I think up an inspiration, as you—well, I won’t start any more quarrels. I’ll only say that I’m not delaying in hopes of having an idea for Betty, because I’ve already got one. I think she ought to advertise.”

“How?”

“Why?”

“Sounds as if she was a breakfast food or a patent medicine.”

“She’s an employment bureau at present,” explained Mary serenely, “and when Morton Hall is ready to open she’ll be a house agent. She’s got to let people know that the bulletin-board in the gym basement is a back member, because she has it beaten cold. She impersonates the great and only link between the talented poor and the idle rich in this community.”

“That sounds well,” admitted Christy, “but how in the world is she to do it—be the great and only link, I mean?”

Mary shrugged her shoulders, and began putting on her gloves, which were new and fitted beautifully. “I leave all that to you,” she said. “I really must go now. Miss Ferris is having an intellectual dinner party for a philosopher from Boston, and we’re asked. I always make a point of wearing my prettiest things to their intellectual dinners—it’s the least and the most that I can do—and one’s prettiest things do take ages to get into. Good-bye, my dears.”

“She’s hit it, as usual,” said Rachel admiringly, when Mary’s trim little figure had rustled out of sight. “The important thing to do is to make the girls realize what you’re here for. Most of them know that you’re the new Student’s Aid secretary——”

“But they don’t know how to use you in their business,” Christy took her up.

“And the ones that need you most will always be too scared,” put in Helen Adams earnestly. “When I was a junior”—she blushed a little at her tardy admission—“my mother lost some money, and we didn’t have as much interest to live on. I thought I might have to leave college, and I wondered if the Student’s Aid would help me to stay. But I was too scared to ask. I started twice to go and see one of the faculty directors, but I just couldn’t screw up my courage. And then mother sold a farm that she’d wanted to get rid of for years, so it was all right. But—well, I wasn’t ashamed to ask for help; I was just scared,” ended Helen incoherently.

“Results of investigation up to date,” began Emily, who was dividing her time between the cashier’s desk and the B. C. A.’s table. “First, let people know what you are here for; secondly, take away the scared feeling from girls, who, as well as you can guess, may need help; third—this is original with me—get the girls who have money properly excited about having things done for them. I can tell you, I used to bless the B’s for the sentiment they created in favor of hiring somebody to sew on skirt braids and mend stockings.”

“Well, the B’s aren’t the only ones who can create sentiments,” said Madeline. “Georgia’s very good at it, and the Dutton twins are regular geniuses. Fluffy Dutton could make people so wildly enthusiastic over the binomial theorem that they’d be ready to die for it if she asked them to.”

“Then get them started on Betty,” ordered Rachel. “Madeline Ayres is hereby elected to enthuse all the champion enthusers on the subject of the enjoyability of being mended up by somebody else.”

Madeline bowed gravely. “I hereby accept the chairmanship of the committee on Proper Excitement of the Idle Rich, and I would suggest Rachel Morrison as chairman of the committee on Proper Encouragement of the Timid Poor, and Christy Mason to head one on Proper Exploitation of Miss Betty Wales, the eager, earnest, and insufficiently employed Student’s Aid Secretary.”

“If I might humbly suggest something at this point,” laughed Christy, “it would be that Betty might like to invent her own committees and choose the chairmen of them.”

“Oh, no indeed,” cried Betty heartily. “You all have such splendid ideas and Madeline has such lovely names for things. Please go on and think of something else. I haven’t dared to say a word all this time, because I was so afraid that you would stop.”

“That’s the proper spirit for an Object.” Madeline patted Betty’s shoulder encouragingly. “Accept the goods the B. C. A.’s provide. Instead of not earning your salary, my child, you’re going to give the Student’s Aid the biggest kind of a bargain. Besides one small secretary (with curls and a dimple) they’re getting the invaluable assistance of at least six prominent graduates, and any number of influential college girls. If that’s not a run for their money, I should like to know what they want.”

“Oh, they haven’t acted dissatisfied,” explained Betty hastily. “It was only I that was worried.”

“Well, I should like to know what you want, then,” amended Madeline with severity. Then she smiled a self-satisfied little smile. “It’s all right to ask ‘What’s in a name?’ There’s nothing much in some names, but if these committees of mine aren’t rather extra popular on account of their stylish headings, I shall stop trying to make a reputation for clever titles and devote my life to producing horrible commonplaces for the Woman’s Page of the Sunday papers. I’m going up to the campus this minute to talk to Georgia and Fluffy Dutton. Come along, Rachel, and get your committee started too.”

“Wait a minute, Madeline,” Emily broke in. “Why not organize a sort of council of all the committees, and have a meeting of it here some afternoon next week to talk over the situation?”

Madeline stared at her sadly. “If you think I’m going to spoil my perfectly good committee by asking it to meet, you don’t understand the first principles of my sweet and simple nature. The last way to properly excite people is to hold stupid meetings. Come along, Rachel, before my beautiful enthusiasm vanishes.”

The next morning Fluffy Dutton appeared in “Psych. 6” ten minutes after the hour, with a yard of black mohair braid trailing conspicuously from her note-book.

The lecture was hopelessly dull, and the class concentrated its wandering attention on the braid which, with a notice pinned to one end, traveled slowly up and down the room.

So read the rhyming notice, and below it was printed in large letters, “Lowest Prices for all Repairing, Mending, and Plain Sewing (including Gym Suits).”

When the strip of braid got back to Fluffy it looked like the tail of a kite, with its collection of orders scattered artistically up and down its length.

“Yes, I wrote the rhyme,” Fluffy admitted modestly, when the class was dismissed. “Wrote it between breakfast and chapel. What made me late to Psych. was buying the braid. Georgia wrote one too, and we are racing each other to see who gets the largest number of orders. Oh, yes, I suppose they do need the work—or the money rather. But the thing that appeals to me is the impression I shall make on my mother when I go home all neat and tidy and mended up for once. Haven’t you a freshman sister? Well, put her down for a gym suit, that’s a dear! Georgia’s going to catch me a dozen grasshoppers if I win. I hate catching things so—my hair always blows in my eyes.”

“And what if Georgia wins?”

“Oh, then I’ve got to catch her a dozen grasshoppers,” said Fluffy resignedly. “But I don’t care much, because I shall hire it done, and that will be all for the good of the cause. But I can’t believe that she will win, because gym suits count as three skirt braids, and positions for waitresses count as five. I’m going to get a lot of those from eleven to twelve. Georgia is furious because this is her lab. morning, and she can’t get a good start.” And Fluffy trailed her skirt braid over to Junior Lit. where she got so many orders that she had to unpin them, place them on file, so to speak, in the front of her shirt-waist, and start over.

It may be reprehensible to wager grasshoppers; but, as Fluffy pointed out to some humane friend, they were doomed in any case, and there was a piquant flavor of adventure about the whole proceeding that appealed strongly to one type of the Harding mind. The committee on the Encouragement (and discovery) of the Timid Poor convened hastily that same evening in Betty’s shiny new office, and discovered that while their day’s work had necessarily been less spectacular than their rivals’, it had been equally effective. There would be no trouble in matching workers to skirt braids.

“But there’ll be all kinds of trouble about flunked courses,” announced Eugenia Ford solemnly, “unless we remember to pay better attention in ‘Psych. 6.’ He gave out a written lesson for to-morrow on purpose, because there was so much whispering and rustling around to-day.”

“The more flunking, the more tutoring,” suggested a pretty junior, and blushed very pink when she remembered that Rachel Morrison was on the faculty.

“That was a foolish remark,” she added apologetically. “For my part, I honestly think there’ll be less flunking than usual. It makes you more in earnest about your own college course when you see how some girls value it, and what they’ll sacrifice to get it. Come along, Eugenia, and let’s begin to burn the midnight oil.”