Betty Wales Senior

"Oh, Rachel Morrison, am I too late for the four-ten train?"

Betty Wales, pink-cheeked and breathless, her yellow curls flying under her dainty lingerie hat, and her crisp white skirts held high to escape the dust of the station platform, sank down beside Rachel on a steamer trunk that the Harding baggage-men had been too busy or too accommodating to move away, and began to fan herself vigorously with a very small and filmy handkerchief.

"No, you're not late, dearie," laughed Rachel, pulling Betty's hat straight, "or rather the train is late, too. Where have you been?"

Betty smiled reminiscently. "Everywhere, pretty nearly. You know that cunning little freshman that had lost her trunks--"

"All those that I've interviewed have lost their trunks," interpolated Rachel.

Betty waved a deprecating hand toward the mountain of baggage that was piled up further down the platform.

"Oh, of course, in that lovely mess. Who wouldn't? But this girl lost hers before she got here-in Chicago or Albany, or maybe it was Omaha. She lives in Los Angeles, so she might have lost them almost anywhere, you see."

"And of course she expected Prexy or the registrar to go back and look for them," added Rachel.

Betty laughed. "Not she. Besides she doesn't seem to care a bit. She seems to think it's a splendid chance to go to New York next week and buy new clothes. But what she wanted of me was to tell her where she could get some shirt waists-just enough to last until she's perfectly sure that the trunks are gone for good. I didn't want to stick around here from three to four, so I said I'd go and show her Evans's and that little new shirt waist place. Of course I pointed out all the objects of interest along the way, and when I mentioned Cuyler's, she insisted upon going in to have ices."

"And how many does that make for you to-day?" demanded Rachel severely.

"Well," Betty defended herself, "I treated you once, and you treated me once, and then we met Christy Mason, and as you couldn't go back with her I had to. But I only had lemonade that time. And this child was so comical, and it was such a good idea."

"What was such a good idea?" inquired Rachel.

"Oh, didn't I tell you? Why, after we'd finished at Cuyler's, she asked me if there weren't any other places something like it, and she said she thought if we tried them all in a row we could tell which was best. But we couldn't," sighed Betty regretfully, "because of course things taste better when you're hungriest. But anyhow she wanted to keep on, because now she can give pointers to other freshmen, and make them think she is a sophomore."

"How about the shirt waists?"

"Oh, she had just got to that when I had to leave her." Betty rose, sighing, as a train whistled somewhere down the track. "Do you suppose Georgia Ames will be on this one?"

"Who can tell?" said Rachel. "There'll be somebody that we know anyway. Wasn't that first day queer and creepy?"

"Yes," agreed Betty, "when nobody got off but freshmen frightened to pieces about their exams. And that was only two days ago! It seems two weeks. I've always rather envied the Students' Aid Society seniors, because they have such a good chance to pick out the interesting freshmen, but I shan't any more."

"Not even after to-day?"

Betty frowned reflectively. "Well, of course to-day has been pretty grand-with all those ices, and Christy, and the freshmen all so cheerful and amusing. And then there's the eight-fifteen. Won't it be fun-to see the Clan get off that? Yes, I think I do envy myself. Can a person envy herself, Rachel?" She gave Rachel's arm a sudden squeeze. "Rachel," she went on very solemnly, "do you realize that we can't ever again in all our lives be Students' Aid Seniors, meeting poor little Harding freshmen?"

Rachel hugged Betty sympathetically. "Yes, I do," she said. "Why at this time next year I shall be earning my own living 'out in the wide, wide world,' as the song says, miles from any of the Clan."

Betty looked across the net-work of tracks, to the hills that make a circle about Harding. "And miles from this dear old town," she added. "But we can write to each other, and make visits, and we can come back to class reunions. But that won't be the same."

Rachel looked at the pretty, yellow-haired child, and wondered if she realized how different her "wide, wide world" was likely to be from Katherine's or Helen Chase Adams's-or Rachel Morrison's. To some of the Clan Harding meant everything they had ever known in the way of culture and scholarly refinement, of happy leisure and congenial friendship. It was comforting somehow to find that girls like Betty and the B's, who had everything else, were just as fond of Harding and were going to be just as sorry to leave it. Rachel never envied anybody, but she liked to think that this life that was so precious to her meant much to all her friends. It made one feel surer that pretty clothes and plenty of spending-money and delightful summers at the seashore or in the mountains did not matter much, so long as the one big, beautiful fact of being a Harding girl was assured. All this flashed through Rachel's mind much more quickly than it can be written down. Aloud she said cheerfully, "Well, we have one whole year more of it."

"I should rather think so," declared Betty emphatically, "and we mustn't waste a single minute of it. I wish it was evening. It seems as if I couldn't wait to see the other girls."

"Well, there's plenty to do just now," said Rachel briskly, as the four-ten halted, and the streams of girls, laden with traveling bags, suit-cases, golf-clubs, tennis-rackets, and queer-shaped bulky parcels that had obviously refused to go into any trunk, began to descend from it.

Rachel hurried forward at once, eager to find someone who needed help or directions or a friendly word of welcome. But Betty stood where she was, just out of the crowd, watching the old girls' excited meetings and the new girls' timid progresses, which were sure to be intercepted before long by some white-gowned, competent senior, anxious to miss no possible opportunity for helpfulness.

Betty had done her part all day, and in addition had taken Rachel's place earlier in the afternoon, to give her a free hour for tutoring. She was tired now and hot, and she had undoubtedly eaten too many ices; but she was also trying an experiment. Where she stood she could watch both platforms from which the girls were descending. Her quick glance shot from one to the other, scanning each figure as it emerged from the shadowy car and stopped for an instant, hesitating, on the platform. The train was nearly emptied of its Harding contingent when all at once Betty gave a little cry and darted forward to meet a girl who was making an unusually careful and prolonged inspection of the crowd below her. She was a slender, pretty girl, with yellow hair, which curled around her face. She carried a trim little hand-bag and a well-filled bag of golf-clubs.

"Can I help you in any way?" asked Betty, holding out a hand for the golf-bag.

The pretty freshman turned a puzzled face toward her, and surrendered the bag. "I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I'm to be a freshman at Harding. Father telegraphed the registrar to meet me. Could you point her out, please?"

"I knew it," laughed Betty, gleefully. Then she turned to the girl. "The registrar is up at the college answering fifty questions a minute, and I'm here to meet you. Give me your checks, and we'll find an expressman. Oh, yes, and where do you board?"

The pretty freshman answered her questions with an air of pleased bewilderment, and later, on the way up the hill, asked questions of her own, laughed shamefacedly over her misunderstanding about the registrar, was comforted when Betty had explained that it was not an original mistake, and invited her new friend to come and see her with that particular sort of eager shyness that is the greatest compliment one girl can pay to another.

"Dear old Dorothy," thought Betty, when she had deposited the freshman, considerably enlightened about college etiquette, at one of the pleasantest of the off-campus houses, and was speeding to the Belden for tea. "What a little goose she must have thought me! And what a dear she was! I wonder if this freshman will ever really care about me that way. I do mean to try to make her. Oh, what a lot of things seniors have to think about!"

But the only thing to think about that evening was the arrival of the eight-fifteen train, which would bring Eleanor, the B's, Nita Reese, Katherine Kittredge, Roberta Lewis, and Madeline Ayres, together with two-thirds of the rest of the senior class back to Harding. It was such fun to saunter down to the station in the warm twilight, to wait, relieved of all responsibilities concerning cabs, expressmen, and belated trunks, while the crowded train pulled in, and then to dash frantically about from one dear friend to another, stopping to shake hands with a sophomore here, and there to greet a junior, but being gladdest, of course, to welcome back the members of "the finest class." Betty and Rachel had arranged not to serve on the reception committee for freshmen that evening, and it was not long before the reunited "Merry Hearts" escaped from the pandemonium at the station to reassemble on the Belden House piazza for what Katherine called a "high old talk."

How the tongues wagged! Eleanor Watson had come straight from her father's luxurious camp in the Colorado mountains, where she and Jim had been having a house-party for some of their Denver friends.

"You girls must all come out next summer," she declared enthusiastically. "Father sent a special invitation to you, Betty, and he and-and-mother"-Eleanor struggled with the new name for the judge's young wife-"are coming on to commencement, and then of course you'll all meet them. Mother is so jolly-she knows just what girls like, and she enters into all the fun, just like one of us. Of course she is absurdly young," laughed Eleanor, as if the stepmother's youth had never been her most intolerable failing in her daughter's eyes.

Babbie had been abroad, on an automobile trip through France. She looked more elegant than ever in a chic little suit from Paris, with a toque to match, and heavy gloves that she had bought in London.

"I've got a pair for each of you in my trunk," she announced, "and here's hoping I didn't mix up the sizes."

"Sixes for me," cried Bob.

"Five and a-half," shrieked Babe.

"Six and a-half," announced Katherine, "and you ought to have brought me two pairs, because I wear mine out more than twice as fast as anybody else."

"What kind of a summer have you had, K?" asked Babe, who never wrote letters, and therefore seldom received any.

"Same old kind," answered Katherine cheerfully. "Mended twenty dozen stockings, got breakfast for seven hungry mouths every morning, played tennis with the boys and Polly, tutored all I could, sent out father's bills,-oh, being the oldest of eight is no snap, I can tell you, but," Katherine added with a chuckle, "it's lots of fun. Boys do like you so if you're rather decent to them."

"I just hate being an only child," declared Bob hotly. "What's the use of a place in the country unless there are children to wade in the brook, and chase the chickens and ride the horses? Next summer I'm going to have fresh-air children up there all summer, and you two"-indicating the other B's-"have got to come and help save them from early deaths."

"All right," said Babe easily, "only I shall wade too."

"And you've got to wash them up before I can touch them," stipulated the fastidious Babbie. "Where have you been all summer, Rachel?"

"Right at home, helping in an office during the day and tutoring evenings. And I've saved enough so that I shan't have to worry one single bit about money this year," announced Rachel triumphantly.

"Good for old Rachel!" cried Madeline Ayres, who had spent the summer nursing her mother through a severe illness and looked worn and thin in consequence. "Then you're as glad to get back to the grind as I am. Betty here, with her summer on an island in Lake Michigan, and Eleanor, and these lucky B's with their childless farms, and their Parisian raiment, don't know what it's like to be back in the arms of one's friends."

"Don't we!" cried a protesting chorus.

"Don't you what?" called a voice out of the darkness, and the real Georgia Ames, cheerful and sunburned and self-possessed shook hands all around, and found a seat behind Madeline on the piazza railing.

"You were all so busy talking that you didn't see me at the train," she explained coolly. "A tall girl with glasses asked if there was anything she could do for me, and I said oh, no, that I'd been here before. Then she asked me my name, and when I said Georgia Ames, I thought she was going to faint."

"She took you for a ghost, my dear," said Madeline, patting her double's shoulder affectionately. "You must get used to being treated that way, you know. You're billed to make a sensation in spite of yourself."

"But we're going to make it up to you all we can," chirped Babbie.

"And you bet we can," added Bob decisively.

"Let's begin by escorting her home," suggested Babe. "There's just about time before ten."

"I saw Miss Stuart yesterday about her coming into the Belden," explained Betty, after they had left Georgia at her temporary off-campus boarding place. "She was awfully nice and amused about it all, and she thinks she can get her in right away, in Natalie Smith's place. Natalie's father has been elected senator, you know, and she's going to come out this winter in Washington."

"Fancy that now!" said Madeline resignedly. "There's certainly no accounting for tastes."

"I should think not," declared Katherine hotly. "If my father was elected President, I'd stay on and graduate with 19- just the same."

"Of course you would," agreed Babbie. "You can come out in Washington any time-or if you can't, it doesn't matter much. But there's only one 19-."

"And yet when we go we shan't be missed," said Katherine sadly. "The college will go on just the same."

"Oh, and I've found out the reason why," cried Betty eagerly. "It's because all college girls are alike. Miss Ferris said so once. She said if you waited long enough each girl you had known and liked would come back in the person of some younger one. But I never really believed it until to-day." And Betty related the story of her successful hunt for the freshman who was like herself.

Everybody laughed.

"But then," asserted Babbie loyally, "she's not so nice as you, Betty. She couldn't be. And I don't believe there are freshmen like all of us."

"Not in this one class," said Rachel. "But it's a nice idea, isn't it? When our little sisters or our daughters come to Harding they can have friends just as dear and jolly as the ones we have had."

"And they will be just as likely to be locked out if they linger on their own or their friends' door-steps after ten," added Madeline pompously, whereat Eleanor, Katherine, Rachel and the B's rushed for their respective abiding places, and the Belden House contingent marched up-stairs singing

"Back to the college again,"

a parody of one of Kipling's "Barrack-Room Ballads" which Madeline Ayres had written one morning during a philosophy lecture that bored her, and which the whole college was singing a week later.

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