"Oh thank you! Thank you so much!" broke in Eleanor and stopped in confusion.

But Miss Mansfield only smiled absently. "Most of my belated freshmen don't express such fervent grat.i.tude for my firmness in pushing them through before the vacation. They try to put me off." She had evidently quite forgotten the other appointment.

"I shall be so glad to have it over," Eleanor murmured.

Miss Mansfield looked after her thoughtfully as she went down the hall.

"Perhaps I've misjudged her," she told herself. "When a girl is so pretty, it's hard to take her seriously."

She said as much to Ethel Hale when they walked home to lunch together, but Ethel was not at all enthusiastic over Miss Watson's earnestness.

"She's very late in working off a condition, I should say," she observed coldly.

"Yes, but I've been away, you know," explained Miss Mansfield. "Oh, Ethel, I wish you could meet him. You don't half appreciate how happy I am."

Ethel, who had decided after much consideration to let Eleanor's affairs take their course, made a mental observation to the effect that an engagement induces shortness of memory and tenderness of heart. Then she said aloud that she also wished she might meet "him."

Time flies between Thanksgiving and Christmas, particularly for freshmen who are looking forward to their first vacation at home. It flies faster after they get there, and when they are back at college it rushes on quite as swiftly but rather less merrily toward the fateful "mid-years."

None of the Chapin house girls had been home at Thanksgiving time, but they were all going for Christmas, except Eleanor Watson, who intended to spend the vacation with an aunt in New York.

They prepared for the flitting in characteristic ways. Rachel, who was very systematic, did all her Christmas shopping, so that she needn't hurry through it at home. Roberta made but one purchase, an ill.u.s.trated "Alice in Wonderland," for her small cousins, and spent all her spare time in re-reading it herself. Helen, in spite of Betty's suggestions about leaning back on her reputation, studied harder than ever, so that she could go home with a clear conscience, while Katherine was too excited to study at all, and Mary Brooks jeered impartially at both of them. Betty conscientiously returned all her calls and began packing several days ahead, so as to make the time seem shorter. Then just as the expressman was driving off with her trunk, she remembered that she had packed her short skirt at the very bottom.

"Thank you ever so much. If he'd got much further I should have had to go home either in this gray bath robe that I have on, or in a white duck suit," she said to Katherine who had gone to rescue the skirt and came back with it over her arm.

She and Katherine started west together and Eleanor and Roberta went with them to the nearest junction. The jostling, excited crowd at the station, the "good-byes" and "Merry Christmases," were great fun. Betty, remembering a certain forlorn afternoon in early autumn, laughed happily to herself.

"What's the joke?" asked Katherine.

"I was thinking how much nicer things like this seem when you're in them," she said, waving her hand to Alice Waite.

At the Cleveland station, mother and Will and Nan and the smallest sister were watching eagerly for the returning wanderer.

"Why, Betty Wales, you haven't changed one bit," announced the smallest sister in tones of deepest wonder. "Why, I'd have known you anywhere, Betty, if I'd met you on the street."

"Three months isn't quite as long as all that," said Betty, hugging the smallest sister, "but I was hoping I looked a little older. n.o.body ever mistakes me for a senior, as they do Rachel Morrison. And I ought to look years and years wiser."

"Nonsense," said Will with a lordly air. "Now a college girl----"

Everybody laughed. "You see we all know your theories about intellectual women," said mother. "So suppose you take up the suit case and escort us home."

The next morning a note arrived from Eleanor.

"DEAREST BETTY," it ran:

"As you always seem to be just around the corner when I get into a box, I want to tell you that I rode down to New York with Miss Hale. She asked me to sit with her and I couldn't well refuse, though I wanted to badly enough. She knew, Betty, but she will never tell. She said she was glad to know me on your account. She asked me how the term had gone with me, and I blushed and stammered and said that I was coming back in a different spirit. She said that college was the finest place in the world for a girl to get acquainted with herself--that cowardice and weakness of purpose and meanness and pettiness stood out so clearly against the background of fineness and squareness; and that four years was long enough to see all sorts of faults in oneself, and change them according to one's new theories. As she said it, it didn't sound a bit like preaching.

"I didn't tell her that I was only in college for one year. I sent her a big bunch of violets to-day--she surely couldn't regard it as a bribe now--and after Christmas I'll try to show her that I'm worth while.

"Merry Christmas, Betty.

"Eleanor."

Nan frowned when Betty told her about Eleanor. "But she isn't a nice girl, Betty. Did I meet her?"

"Yes, she's the one you thought so pretty--the one with the lovely eyes and hair."

"Betty," said Nan soberly, "you don't do things like this?"

"I!" Betty flushed indignantly. "Weren't there all kinds of girls when you were in college, Nan? Didn't you ever know people who did 'things like this'?"

Nan laughed. "There certainly were," she said. "I'll trust you, Betty.

Only don't see too much of Miss Watson, or she'll drag you down, in spite of yourself."

"But Ethel's dragging her up," objected Betty. "And I gave her the first boost, by knowing Ethel. Not that I meant to. I never seem to accomplish things when I mean to. You remember Helen Chase Adams?"

"With great pleasure. She noticed my youthful appearance."

"Well, I've been all this term trying to reform her clothes, but I can't improve her one bit, except when I set to work and do it all myself. I should think you'd be afraid she'd drag me into dowdiness, I have to see so much of her."

Nan smiled at the dainty little figure in the big chair. "I don't notice any indications yet," she said. "It took you an hour to dress this morning, exactly as it always does. But you'd better take care. What are you going to do to-day?"

"Make your friend Helen Chase Adams a stock for Christmas," announced Betty, jumping up and pulling Nan after her. "And you've got to help, seeing you admire her so much."

CHAPTER X

A RUMOR

After Christmas there were goodies from home to eat and Christmas-gifts to arrange in their new quarters. Betty's piece de resistance was a gorgeous leather sofa pillow stamped with the head of a ferocious Indian chief. Eleanor had a great bra.s.s bowl, which in some mysterious fashion was kept constantly full of fresh roses, a shelf full of new books, and more dresses than her closet would hold. Katherine had a chafing-dish, Rachel a Persian rug, and Roberta an ill.u.s.trated "Alice in Wonderland"

of her own. To Betty's great relief Helen had brought back two small pillows for her couch, all her skirts were lengthened, and the Christmas stock of black silk with its white linen turnovers replaced the clumsy woolen collars that she had worn with her winter shirt-waists. And--she was certainly learning to do her hair more becomingly. There wasn't a very marked improvement to be sure, but if Betty could have watched Helen's patient efforts to turn her vacation to account in the matter of hair-dressing, she would have realized how much the little changes meant, and would have been more hopeful about her pupil's progress. Not until the end of her junior year did Helen Adams reach the point where she could be sure that one's personal appearance is quite as important a matter as one's knowledge of calculus or Kantian philosophies; but, thanks largely to Betty, she was beginning to want to look her best, and that was the first step toward the things that she coveted. The next, and one for which Betty, with her open-hearted, free-and-easy fashion of facing life, was not likely to see the need, must be to break down the barriers that Helen's sensitive shyness had erected between herself and the world around her. The self-confidence that Caroline Barnes had cruelly, if unintentionally wounded, must be restored before Helen could find the place she longed for in the little college world.

No one had had any very exciting vacation adventures except Rachel, who was delayed on her way home by a freight wreck and obliged to spend Christmas eve on a windswept siding with only a ham sandwich between her and starvation, and Eleanor, whose vacation had been one mad whirl of metropolitan gaiety. Her young aunt, who sympathized with her niece's distaste for college life, and couldn't imagine why on earth Judge Watson had insisted upon his only daughter's trying it for a year at least, did her utmost to make Eleanor enjoy her visit. So she had dined at the Waldorf, sat in a box at the theatre and the opera, danced and shopped to her heart's content, and had seen all the sights of New York.

And at all the festivities Paul West, a friend of the family and also of Eleanor's, was present as Eleanor's special escort and avowed admirer.

Naturally she had come back in an ill humor. Between late hours and excitement she was completely worn out. She wanted to be in New York, and failing that she wanted Paul West to come and talk New York to her, and bring her roses for the big bra.s.s bowl that she had found in a dingy little shop in the Russian quarter. She threw her good resolutions to the winds, received Miss Hale's thanks for the violets very coldly, and begged Betty to forget the sentimental letter that she had written before Christmas.

"But I thought it was a nice letter," said Betty. "Eleanor, why won't you give yourself a chance? Go and see Ethel this afternoon, and--and then set to work to show her what you said you would," she ended lamely.

Eleanor only laughed. "Sorry, Betty, but I'm going to Winsted this afternoon. Paul has taken pity on me; there's a sleighing party. I thought perhaps you were invited too."

"No, but I'm going skating with Mary and Katherine," said Betty cheerfully, "and then at four Rachel and I are going to do Latin."

"Oh, Latin," said Eleanor significantly. "Let me think. Is it two or three weeks to mid-years?"

"Two, just."