It was Saturday, and Patty had been working ever since breakfast, with a
brief pause for luncheon, on a paper entitled "Shakspere, the Man." At
four o'clock she laid down her pen, pushed her manuscript into the
waste-basket, and faced her room-mate defiantly.
"What do I care about Shakspere, the man? He's been dead three hundred
years."
Priscilla laughed unfeelingly. "What do I care about a frog's nervous
system, for the matter of that? But I am writing an interesting
monograph on it, just the same."
"Ah, I dare say you are making a valuable addition to the subject."
"It's quite as valuable as your addition to Shaksperiana."
Patty dropped a voluble sigh and turned to the window to note that it
was raining dismally.
"Oh, hand it in," said Priscilla, comfortingly. "You've worked on it all
day, and it's probably no worse than the most of your things."
"No sense to it," said Patty.
"They're used to that," laughed Priscilla.
"What are you laughing at, anyway?" Patty asked crossly. "I don't see
anything to laugh at in this beastly place. Always having to do what you
don't want to do when you most don't want to do it. Just the same, day
after day: get up by bells, eat by bells, sleep by bells. I feel like
some sort of a delinquent living in an asylum."
Priscilla treated this outburst with the silence it deserved, and Patty
turned back to her perusal of the rain-soaked campus.
"I wish something would happen," she said discontentedly. "I think I'll
put on a mackintosh and go out in search of adventure."
"Pneumonia will happen if you do."
"What business has it to be raining, anyway, when it ought to be
snowing?"
As this was unanswerable, Priscilla returned to her frogs, and Patty
drummed gloomily on the window-pane until a maid appeared with a card.
"A caller?" cried Patty. "A missionary! A rescuer! A deliverer! Heaven
send it's for me!"
"Miss Pond," said Sadie, laying the card on the table.