Montana Marie O’Toole accepted with her accustomed submissive sweetness the new tutors “elected” to office by Mary Brooks Hinsdale and tactfully introduced to their victim by Betty Wales, who explained just why she had consented to a division of labor.

“They do seem to make me understand better,” Marie told Betty, a few days after the beginning of the new régime. “That Miss Mason is awfully smart, isn’t she? But fortunately she isn’t anything like that smart tutor I had last summer. Miss Mason makes me puzzle things out for myself. It takes a lot of her valuable time, I’m afraid.” Poor Marie sighed deeply. “It’s a great responsibility, wasting the time of a faculty and a—what’s that Miss Mason is?—oh, yes, a Fellow in Mathematics. And I can’t pay Miss Adams, because it is against the rules for the faculty to be paid for tutoring. Is it against the rules for me to send her flowers every day, Miss Wales?”

Betty remembered how violets used to make Helen’s eyes shine, and said no. “Only you mustn’t be extravagant, you know. Every day is much too often to send flowers.”

“I can’t say that I think it’s any too often to get flowers,” smiled Montana Marie. “And so far Pa hasn’t objected to any of my bills. It’s fortunate, isn’t it, that my father isn’t as poor as I am stupid?”

“You’re not stupid,” Betty encouraged her. “If you’ll only keep on trying——”

“Oh, I shall keep trying.” Montana Marie was firm as a rock on that point. “I’ve inherited my father’s stick-to-itiveness, if I haven’t inherited his brains. Now I might have been a flyaway like Ma. And in that case things would have been pretty hopeless, wouldn’t they, Miss Wales?”

Two days later Montana Marie appeared at Betty’s office, the fire of determination in her lovely eyes.

“I saw a sign on the bulletin-board that said there was an unexpected vacancy in Morton Hall. Is that so?”

Betty nodded abstractedly, her finger on the place where she had left off reading a letter from Mr. Morton.

“Then I want to fill it. I’ve got to leave the Vincent Arms because it’s too diverting to my mind. If I could live in the dormitory with you, I should be made!”

“But Morton Hall is a special dormitory,” Betty explained patiently, as she had many times before, to admirers who had thought it would be the making of them to live in “her dormitory.” “And you’re not eligible.” She went into details. “So you can’t possibly come, and if you could I don’t think you’d like it. The harder a person works the more she needs recreation. But most of my girls have had too much work and too little play all their lives long. They don’t know how to play the way Georgia Ames and Miss Hart and the Duttons do. You’d find them dull after the others.”

“Then in that case my mind would stay right on my work. I’m just the opposite from them, Miss Wales. I’ve had too much play and too little work all my life until now. They say opposites attract, so I’m sure I should get along splendidly with those girls.”

“But you’re not eligible,” Betty repeated.

Montana Marie considered that. “Suppose no poor girl wants to come in just at present,” she suggested at last. “Moving in the middle of the term is a bother, isn’t it? Don’t most girls promise to keep their rooms right through the term or even for the whole year? Couldn’t I have the room as long as it is empty,—just until some eligible girl wants it?”

Montana Marie didn’t mind moving in, with the strong probability of having to move out again very soon; she had lived in trunks and hotels most of her life, and was used to picking up at a moment’s notice whenever her flyaway mother got tired of eating Swiss honey, or buying Dutch silver, or studying German art, and decided to move on.

The vacant room that Betty had advertised on the bulletin-board was a third floor single, but when the Thorn, who shared one of Morton Hall’s few doubles, begged quite pathetically for a chance to room alone, Betty had not the heart to refuse her. Secretly, too, she was relieved at the prospect of thus finally settling the question of Montana Marie’s coming into the house; for in spite of her protégée’s excellent logic, Betty doubted the wisdom of mixing such alien elements as Montana Marie and the Morton Hall girls, and if anybody suffered from the situation she felt sure it would not be the exuberant Montana Marie, with a mind of her own and a genius for getting what she wanted. Still Marie had been thoroughly in earnest in wanting to find a boarding place where she could study without interruption. Betty broke the news to her gently.

“Matilda Thorn’s—I mean Matilda Jones’s roommate,” she explained, “is a funny little junior from Corey Corners, New Hampshire. She taught a district school for two years, to earn money enough to justify her in beginning her college course. In the summers she is waitress in one of the big White Mountain hotels, not far from where she lives, and she usually earns a little extra by taking care of some rich woman’s children when their nurse wants a holiday or an evening off.”

Montana Marie listened intently. “She must know how to concentrate her mind, if she does all that. I should think she’d be an ideal roommate for me, shouldn’t you, Miss Wales? But maybe she won’t like me. Could you arrange to have us meet, Miss Wales, and then you could ask her to say honestly what she thought, and if she didn’t object to me I could move in right away.”

Montana Marie’s calm determination to look on the bright side of things took the wind out of Betty’s opposition, just as, a little later, her radiant, magnetic charm won from the rather washed-out, nervous junior from Corey Corners an eager assent to Betty’s proposal. Montana Marie, five trunks, a Mexican saddle and a striped Parisian hat-box containing a hat that was too big for any compartment in the pigskin hat trunk, appeared without loss of time at Morton Hall. Being systematic, Montana Marie immediately set to work at disposing of her possessions within the limited area of half a rather small room and half a very small closet. After an hour’s work and ten minutes’ thoughtful contemplation, she invited her new roommate, who was trying to write an argument paper, to go down-town and help find a carpenter. The roommate compromised by telling Marie where the best carpenter in Harding was to be found, and Marie went off happily. A minute later she reappeared with a question.

“I’m going to have him make me a box to go under my bed. Do you keep things under your bed? You don’t? Then do you mind if I have him make two boxes? I have such a silly lot of clothes. Oh, thank you so much. You’re the nicest roommate! Sure there are no errands I can do for you?”

Without looking up from her work, the strenuous little junior said no to that, for at least the third time; but when Marie presented her with a box of chocolates, evidently as a reward for being obliging about the bed-box, she relaxed her Spartan discipline and ate so much candy that she had indigestion, and was compelled to finish her argument paper in a style far inferior to that in which she had begun it. This adventure made her wary, and however easily the rest of Morton Hall fell into Montana Marie’s enticing snares, her roommate kept aloof. Her name was Cordelia Payson, but Montana Marie always referred to her by Fluffy Dutton’s title, “The Concentrating Influence,” which Straight Dutton shortened, for her own and others’ convenience, to “Connie.”

The carpenter recommended by “Connie” duly produced two bed-boxes, after Montana Marie’s design, which included castors, brass handles for pulling them out and lifting the covers, and interior upholstery of pale blue satin, violet-scented. When they were delivered, Montana Marie again attacked the problem of emptying the five trunks which had effectively blocked the hallway since her arrival. When she had done her best with the bed-boxes, there was still a trunkful of dresses to dispose of. Montana Marie again spent ten minutes in contemplation, and then sallied forth to order a closet pole arranged on a pulley, and equipped with two dozen dress-hangers.

“I’ll keep it up in that waste space under the ceiling,” she explained to the Concentrating Influence. “I’ll hang my evening dresses on it, and things I don’t like and seldom wear. When I want to let it down, it won’t kill me to empty out part of the closet on to some chairs. Otherwise,”—Montana Marie surveyed the tightly wedged mass of clothes cheerfully,—“otherwise I’m afraid it wouldn’t plough through that mass and drop down. I’ve got too many things, that’s evident. When mid-years are over and I have a little time to turn around in, I’ll sort them out and get rid of all but what I strictly need. And then,” she giggled cheerfully, “it will be time to get a lot of new clothes for spring. I love spring clothes, don’t you?”

“I’ve got to finish reading this book to-night,” the Concentrating Influence told her primly, planting her elbows on her desk, and stuffing her fingers into her ears.

“Oh, excuse me,” begged Montana Marie contritely. “I’m a dreadful bother. I talk too much. When you finish the book, could you show me a little about these originals that come after the twenty-sixth proposition?”

The Concentrating Influence had not forgotten her solid geometry. With casual assistance from her, and the definite and determined help of Mary Brooks Hinsdale and her corps of selected tutors, Montana Marie was making some slight progress. Betty’s part was to keep Marie fully impressed with the slightness of the progress and the need for keeping up all of her work instead of letting part slide while she devoted herself to the mastery of one particularly troublesome subject; also to preach her tactful little sermons about the rights of roommates who were too obliging to object to being imposed upon. After one of these lectures Montana Marie always presented the Concentrating Influence with candy or flowers in absurdly generous quantities.

But it was not the candy and flowers that made the junior from Corey Corners feel as if, after having “scraped along” for years, she had suddenly begun to live. It was Montana Marie’s unconscious assumption that she, Cordelia Payson, was a wonderful person, that all Harding College thought so, that girls like Georgia Ames and the Duttons and even that snobbish Eugenia Ford had noticed how well she did in argument, had been sorry she didn’t “make” the class hockey team, and had wished they knew her better.

Montana Marie could not help saying pleasant things; she had been educated to do so. She could not help admiring mental concentration; Betty Wales had talked nothing else to her all the year and “Connie” illustrated all Betty’s points as perfectly as if she had been created for no other purpose.

So it was small credit to Montana Marie that she made Cordelia Payson happy. Neither was it at all to her credit that she was instrumental in bringing Jim Watson hot-foot to Harding to investigate the supposedly prevailing dissatisfaction with Morton Hall, and incidentally to give the overworked Betty Wales two splendid, all-the-afternoon rides, and, in addition, the restful feeling that she was being looked after by a resourceful and a resolute young man.

It all came about in this way. One day when Marie had finished a Latin lesson with Mrs. Hinsdale, that lady walked back to the campus with her pupil on the way to a reception in town. Mary inquired solicitously for Betty, whom she had not seen for several days.

“She’s all right, I guess,” explained Marie easily. “Only she’s sort of absent-minded, and I notice that she doesn’t eat much.”

“She’s overdoing dreadfully,” sighed Mary.

Montana Marie considered. “As far as I have noticed I should say that a person feels better for working hard. Ma does nothing, and Pa never takes a vacation, and he’s a lot stronger than Ma is, and happier. But work is one thing, and worry is another,” sighed Marie. “Worrying uses a person up like anything. Maybe Miss Wales has something on her mind. Who is this Mr. Jim Watson that you all tease her about, Mrs. Hinsdale?”

Mary explained, with a dignity that was quite lost on Montana Marie, about Jim and Eleanor, Jim and Morton Hall, and Jim and Betty.

“Wonder if she’d like to see him,” speculated Marie. “She seemed awfully cheerful when I saw her in the summer, right after he’d been in Cleveland. For my part I should certainly like to see him.” Marie sighed again. “I get so sick of having no men to talk to—not even faculty men. Every single one of my divisions recites to a woman.”

That night Montana Marie let her mind wander shamefully from math., lit., and Latin prose. At last her contemplative smile flashed out into sudden, mischievous brilliancy. Selecting a sheet of her best lavender-tinted, violet-scented note-paper, she covered it rapidly with her sprawling, unformed characters, and directed it to Mr. James Watson, in care of his firm, the name of which she had fortunately remembered from Mary’s recital.

Two days later Jim Watson, grinning sheepishly, stuck his head, in his accustomed furtive fashion, in at Betty’s office door. Finding only one small person, with curls and a dimple, in the office, Jim came in a little further, and stood awaiting developments, grinning now much more cheerfully.

“What in the world are you doing here?” demanded Betty breathlessly, jumping up to shake hands.

Jim strolled over to the desk. “Don’t get up.” He sat down solemnly in the visitors’ chair. “Don’t you really know why I’m here?”

“No-o,” gasped Betty, dreadfully afraid of what might be coming next. “But I know something else. You ought to be hard at work in New York.”

“I have come,” Jim began very solemnly, “to investigate serious charges brought against the efficiency of the architects, particularly the resident architect-in-charge, of Morton Hall. My first duty is naturally to ascertain whether you are personally convinced of the truth of said charges. We aim to please.” Jim grinned again. “Particularly, to please one small secretary, with curls and a dimple, and a lot too much to do.”

Betty leaned back in her big chair and wrinkled her face into a delightful, childlike, all-over smile. “Please explain, Jim. It’s mean to tease a person like me that can’t ever see through it.”

Jim frowned, a portentous, businesslike frown. “Haven’t I made myself clear, Miss Secretary?” He fumbled in his pockets, and produced with a flourish Montana Marie’s lavender-tinted, violet-scented, scrawling note. “I got this communication yesterday, and I came right up to see about it.” He handed the note to Betty.

Betty puzzled out Marie’s hieroglyphics slowly, read the note through again, and sighed despairingly, “What will that girl do next?” Then she laughed till the tears came. Then she turned severely upon Jim.

“You could see that it was all nonsense. Why in the world did you bother to come rushing up here on account of a piece of foolishness like that?”

Jim only grinned. “I wanted to meet Miss Marie O’Toole of Morton Hall,” he announced calmly. “Have you any objections?” Then he went on, in a different tone, “I say, Betty, be a good fellow, and let’s go riding after lunch. I’m feeling a bit stale,—honestly I am. An office-man like me ought never to have been brought up on ranches. If I hadn’t acquired the fresh-air-and-exercise habit when I was a kid, I might be able to make a reputation now. But I can’t stick to a desk long enough.”

“Miss O’Toole will ride with you, poor tired man,” laughed Betty. “She comes from the West, too, and she rides like an Amazon, so she’ll give you all the exercise you want, trying to keep up with her.”

“Thanks,” said Jim briefly. “I prefer you. Say yes, Betty, like a lady, and I’ll clear right out and let you do a morning’s work in peace.”

Betty hesitated and was lost.

“At two then,” Jim sang back gaily as he “cleared out.”

Five minutes later Montana Marie appeared in Betty’s office looking particularly radiant. “I just stopped in to tell you that I’ve passed off my entrance Latin,” she said. “I knew you’d be glad——” Her eyes fell on the lavender-tinted note, which Jim had forgotten to recover, and she flushed guiltily.

“You shouldn’t have done such a thing,” Betty told her severely, as her glance followed Marie’s. “Mr. Watson has just been here. He thought—he wanted——” Betty stopped short, and her merry laughter rang out so loud that the psychology class, which was reciting next door, heard it and wondered.

“Mr. Watson will be at the Morton for dinner to-night,” Betty began again, smiling this time, “so be sure not to go out anywhere, because I shall need you to help entertain him.”

“I guess you don’t need me,” beamed Montana Marie. “I rather guess not! But I’ll be there. You can count on that, Miss Wales. I—I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you, but——” Marie stopped and slipped softly out, for Betty was not listening. With a shining, far-away look in her eyes, and a smile on her lips, she was thinking of—something else.

“I’m not sorry,—not a bit sorry,” murmured Montana Marie, hurrying off to her next class. She did not refer to the fact that, by delaying too long in Betty’s office, she had made herself late again—the second time that week—for freshman math.