[Illustration: “I THINK I SHALL LIKE IT HERE”]
BETTY WALES
DECIDES
A STORY FOR GIRLS
_by_
MARGARET WARDE
AUTHOR OF
BETTY WALES FRESHMAN
BETTY WALES SOPHOMORE
BETTY WALES JUNIOR
BETTY WALES SENIOR
BETTY WALES B. A.
BETTY WALES & CO.
BETTY WALES ON THE CAMPUS
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATED BY
EVA M NAGEL
THE PENN
PUBLISHING COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA
MCMXI
COPYRIGHT
1911 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY
[Illustration]
Introduction
Betty Wales and her friends appeared first in “Betty Wales, Freshman,”
which told the story of their freshman year at Harding College. Eleanor
Watson was in that group; so were Mary Brooks, Helen Adams, Roberta,
the three B’s, and Katharine Kittredge, of Kankakee. Madeline Ayres
made her entrance in “Betty Wales, Sophomore.” “Betty Wales, Junior,”
and “Betty Wales, Senior” completed the undergraduate history of
Betty’s class. “Betty Wales, B. A.” is the story of a summer abroad,
where Betty met Mr. Morton, and “Babe” met his son. “Betty Wales & Co.”
described the beginnings of the famous Tally-ho Tea-Shop, and “Betty
Wales on the Campus” brought Betty back to Harding as the Secretary of
the Student’s Aid Committee. She lived in Morton Hall, erected by the
testy old millionaire because Betty’s work had won his sympathy and
interest.
The “ploshkin” referred to in this story was at first a fascinatingly
impossible little animal in a story that Eugenia Ford told Betty’s
Smallest Sister, but Madeline Ayres saw its wide possibilities as a
fun-maker, and Jasper J. Morton helped the girls put images of it on
the market.
Contents
I. A SLUMP IN PLOSHKINS 9
II. MONTANA MARIE O’TOOLE DAWNS UPON HARDING COLLEGE 27
III. THE INITIATION OF MONTANA MARIE 45
IV. MONTANA MARIE TAKES A RIDE 64
V. THE B. C. A.’S “UNDERTAKE” MONTANA MARIE 81
VI. THE INTERVENTION OF JIM 98
VII. BINKS AMES MAKES A DISCOVERY 115
VIII. JISTS AND SUFFRAGISTS 131
IX. THE TALLY-HO’S DIGNIFIED DINNER 147
X. RESCUING MONTANA MARIE 165
XI. THE BEGUILING OF THE SMALLEST SISTER 179
XII. THE POPPING MASCOTS 193
XIII. MONTANA MARIE AND THE PROM. MAN SUPPLY COMPANY 212
XIV. ENTERTAINING GEORGIA’S SISTER 227
XV. THE NEW WOMAN AT HARDING 246
XVI. THE FRECKLES OF MISS A. PEASE 265
XVII. TWO SURPRISES 283
XVIII. MONTANA MARIE DISAPPEARS 293
XIX. LIVING UP TO HARDING 311
XX. CLIMAXES 324
XXI. THE END OF BETTY WALES 341
Illustrations
PAGE
“I THINK I SHALL LIKE IT HERE” _Frontispiece_
“GO AHEAD--MAKE A SPEECH” 54
“I’VE PASSED OFF MY ENTRANCE LATIN” 113
SHE PEEPED CAUTIOUSLY IN AT THE DOOR 161
HE WAVED HIS PURPLE BANNER 205
A TALL MERRY-FACED GIRL 240
“SO I’VE SHUT MY EYES, AND I’VE CHOSEN” 335
Betty Wales Decides
CHAPTER I
A SLUMP IN PLOSHKINS
It was a breathless August afternoon. Betty Wales, very crisp and cool
in white linen, sat in a big wicker chair on the broad piazza of the
family cottage at Lakeside. On the wicker table beside her were a big
basket of family mending, a new novel, and an uncut magazine. In her
lap was a fuzzy gray kitten. Betty Wales was deliberately ignoring the
mending; she had been “perfectly crazy” to begin the new novel, but now
she ignored that likewise; she had entirely forgotten the fuzzy gray
kitten. She was busily engaged in the altogether delectable occupation,
for a hot August afternoon, of doing nothing at all.
Jim Watson,--Eleanor’s brother, you remember, and the architect in
charge of Morton Hall, also a warm admirer of Morton Hall’s pretty
little manager,--had been in Cleveland for a week “on business.” The
business was connected with two big houses that his firm were building
there. It had left all his evenings and most of his afternoons wholly
at the disposal of the Wales’s family cook, alias the pretty little
manager of Morton Hall. The cook had rushed through her work in a
scandalous fashion that caused the Wales family to indulge in many
loud complaints of too-early breakfasts, “snippy” lunches, and wildly
extravagant dinners--Jim always got out to Lakeside in plenty of time
for the dinners. He had left for New York the night before, after the
very most elaborate and delicious dinner of them all, and the Wales’s
family cook was tired, though she did not know it, and happy, in spite
of a queer lonely sensation that was hopelessly mixed with relief at
having a long, lazy afternoon all to herself, to spend with a kitten
for company, a book for diversion, and plenty of mending in case the
unwonted joys of idleness should pall.
At four, when the postman came by on his afternoon round, Betty was
still staring absently off at the blue lake, thinking vague, happy
thoughts. She was so absorbed that she never even saw the postman,
who obligingly walked across the piazza to her corner and dropped the
afternoon mail in her lap, right on top of the gray kitten, who was too
sleepy to care.
Just one letter, and it was for Miss B. Wales, the address typewritten,
the name of Jasper J. Morton’s world-famous banking house in a corner
of the envelope. It was from one of Mr. Morton’s secretaries,--not the
Harding graduate that Betty had sent him, but an energetic young man
who had been with the firm for several years. It was he to whom Mr.
Morton had delegated the task of marketing ploshkins in New York and
elsewhere, and he and Betty had become quite friendly over the checks
and reorders and other business arrangements.
“I regret to state,” he wrote now, “that the ploshkin market has
slumped. Our regular customers all report that they are ‘stuck,’
to use a technical expression of commerce, with the ploshkins they
already have on hand, that the demand has entirely dropped off, and
that they do not anticipate a revival of it.
“Mr. Morton has asked me to communicate with you, expressing his
regret at the sudden termination of so profitable a business. (You
will be amused, I know, to hear that the first thing he said was,
‘My, but that relieves my mind. It always worried me to think of
people wanting to waste their money on those silly old splashers.’)
“Fortunately the spring sales used up practically all the stock you
had on hand, so there will be no losses to meet. But there will also,
I fear, be no more profits.
“Mr. Morton respectfully suggests that the ingenious young lady whose
name he is unable to recall shall coöperate with you in inventing a
new specialty. ‘Most anything will do if it’s only silly enough,’
in Mr. Morton’s opinion; and he will gladly arrange to market the
product as he has the ploshkins.
“Hoping anxiously for such a renewal of our business relations, I
remain,
“Most respectfully,
“SAMUEL STONE.”
Betty laughed heartily, all by herself, over Mr. Morton’s
characteristic remarks. It was fortunate, she reflected, that when he
was cross he was always comical. Otherwise she would never have made
friends with him in Europe, and then he would never have built Morton
Hall at Harding to please her, nor helped the Tally-ho Tea-Shop out
of its very worst trouble,--nor sold the ploshkins. She smiled all
to herself at Mr. Samuel Stone’s “anxious hopes,” and frowned as she
contemplated the utter impossibility of making the ingenious young lady
(named Madeline Ayres) invent a new “specialty” except by some such
happy accident as had produced the ploshkin, that comically sad little
creature, with an “ingrowing face” that smiled, a prickly, slippery
tail, and one wing to hide behind, plaster images of which had been
circulated, by the energy and enterprise of Jasper J. Morton and Samuel
Stone, from New York to San Francisco, if not further.
And having laughed and smiled and frowned, Betty read the letter all
through again, sat up straight in her big easy chair, and, choosing
one of Will’s stockings, began to darn the very biggest hole in it.
She wanted to think hard, and she could always think harder when her
fingers were busy.
A slump in the ploshkin market meant no more ploshkin income. When she
considered staying at home for the winter, Betty had counted on that
hitherto prolific source of revenue to keep Dorothy on at Miss Dick’s,
as well as to provide herself with necessary pin-money. Father wanted
her to stay at home, but Betty wondered sadly if he realized how much
she would cost! A girl doesn’t know about that until she has tried
living on her earnings. Betty Wales understood just how fast little
things will count up, try as you may to be careful. Father wasn’t yet
back on Easy Street; Will had made a bad joke to the effect that Easy
Street was certainly Hard Street when it came to getting a place on it
again after you had carelessly slipped off.
“That’s true as well as funny,” Betty reflected sadly, “and the reason
is that people who have been rich don’t know how to be poor. We’re
still an extravagant family, no matter how hard we try to save. So I
almost think--oh dear! I wonder if they do miss me much at home when
I’m away! Because President Wallace is sure that Morton Hall will
miss me if I don’t go back to it. I wonder if he’s right. I almost
think---- Goodness, I should hate to seem conceited about it, because
I know as well as anything that it’s perfect nonsense the way they
all think I can do things that other people can’t. Anybody could do
anything that I’ve ever done,--if they’d only try,” ended Betty Wales,
with a fine disregard for antecedents and a serene lack of appreciation
of the rarity of people who try--and who keep on trying to the bitter
end.
If Dorothy didn’t go back to Miss Dick’s there would be two extra ones
at home; that would put boarding, with five in the family, out of the
question, and rents in town were frightfully expensive. It did seem
as if a person who had a good salary waiting for her in Harding would
better “go back on the job,” as Will would have put it.
A big, snorting motor-car slewed round a corner, with a silvery peal of
its “gabriel,” glided swiftly down the street, and drew up with a lurch
in front of the Wales cottage. Betty, her eyes on Will’s stocking, her
thoughts working hard on the perplexing Harding-or-no-Harding problem,
gave a little start at discovering that she was going to have callers.
By the time she had dropped the stocking and carefully arranged the
kitten in a comfortable little furry ball on a hammock cushion, the two
ladies in the tonneau of the car had shed their protecting goggles,
hoods, veils, and ulsters, and started up the path to the door.
“Nobody I know,” reflected Betty, going forward hospitably to meet
them. They were both young-more likely to be Nan’s friends than
Mother’s, and Nan was off spending a week with Ethel Hale Eaton.
Looking more closely Betty decided that they must have mistaken the
house; the pretty, overdressed girl with the huge plumed hat, and the
more subdued young woman in a wonderful silk gown and a close-fitting
toque, both in the very latest style, did not look quite like friends
of Nan or indeed of any of the Wales family.
The girl was ahead as they came up the steps. “Is Miss Wales at home?”
she asked in a sweet, assured voice, smiling a dazzling smile from
beneath the big drooping plumes.
“Do you mean the real Miss Wales-my sister Nan?” Betty asked. “She’s
away paying some visits. I’m Betty, the next youngest. Won’t you sit
down a moment?”
“Thanks, yes,” the older woman, with the sweet, subdued face and manner
answered. “And it ain’t your sister we want. It’s you. I’m Mrs. James
O’Toole, of Paris, France, and that’s my girl Marie.”
“I’m very glad to meet you both,” Betty stammered. “That is,--I haven’t
met you before, have I? I have such a bad memory.”
“No, you haven’t met us,” Miss Marie O’Toole told her with an amused
giggle. “If you had, you’d remember. Even people with bad memories
don’t forget Ma and me.”
“No?” Betty laughed back at her in friendly fashion. In spite of the
plumes, too much jewelry, and an absurdly hobbled skirt, there was
something very winning about Miss Marie O’Toole, with her pretty doll
face and her sweet, thrilling voice. But Mrs. O’Toole was a curiosity.
Betty had had to try hard not to jump when the demure little lady,
dressed with such exquisite elegance, had opened her mouth and been
suddenly transformed into a very ordinary person with a dreadful twang
in her voice and a shocking lack of grammar in her conversation. She
listened in blank silence to her daughter’s comment, and then handed
Betty a card.
“That’s to interduce us. Has the letter followed?”
Betty stared in bewilderment. The card was President Wallace’s,
introducing Mrs. and Miss O’Toole. “Letter will follow” was written
after the names.
“Oh,” exclaimed Betty comprehendingly, “you are friends of President
Wallace’s, and he is going to write me about--something. I’m very glad
to meet any friends of his. Isn’t he splendid?”
“I think he’s a cross old bear,” returned Miss Marie O’Toole sweetly,
“and Ma thinks he hasn’t ordinary common sense, don’t you, Ma?”
“Never mind about that,” said Mrs. O’Toole sharply. “But we ain’t
any friends of his. The letter to follow is about Marie entering the
college. I told you we had ought to have waited a while, Marie, for
that there letter.”
Marie smiled blandly. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess we’re capable of
explaining ourselves to Miss Wales.”
“I’m sure you are,” agreed Betty hastily. She was bursting with
suppressed curiosity.
“Well,” began Mrs. O’Toole, “it’s like this. Marie wants to go to
college. I can’t think why, but she does. She met some swell New York
girls in Paris last winter, and they told her that it was all the rage.
Of course,” added Mrs. O’Toole magnificently, “we know all the elect of
the American colony.”
“She means élite,” explained Miss Marie with a giggle. “Hurry up, Ma,
and get to the point of your story.”
Mrs. O’Toole sighed a patient, long-suffering sigh and continued. “So
when we came across in June, Marie went right up to Harding and took
the exams, and she failed in most of ’em. So then she was more sot
than ever on her idee, and she hired a teacher to travel with us all
summer--a girl that this President Wallace recommended. And last week
she tried again and done better, but not good enough to suit.”
“The tutor was so tiresome,” explained Miss Marie with asperity. “She
told me that I couldn’t possibly pass, so of course I couldn’t. Go on,
Ma.”
“So then she was still more sot to go,” went on Mrs. O’Toole, “and she
sent her Pa a tellergram and he----”
“You can’t tell that part,” broke in her daughter hastily. “Don’t you
remember that he said not to--President Wallace, I mean?”
“Well, anyhow, nothing come of it,” said Mrs. O’Toole wearily. “But
he finally sent us here, to say that if you’d undertake Marie she
could come, otherwise not. She’ll be terrible disappointed if you
won’t,” ended Mrs. O’Toole, “and if you will she’s willing to pay quite
regardless.”
Marie giggled nervously. “That sounds as if I was buying a hat, Ma, or
an invitation to an exclusive ball. President Wallace said that money
was no object to Miss Wales.”
Mrs. O’Toole glanced sharply at the little cottage and then at the
perfectly plain white dress that Betty was wearing, with its marked
contrast to Marie’s furbelows. “Money is something of an object to any
sensible person--except some college presidents,” she added pointedly.
Miss Marie O’Toole turned to Betty with a pleading smile on her pretty
face. “I guess you understand what I mean,” she said, “and please do
say that you’ll ‘undertake’ me.”
Betty looked perplexedly from one to the other. “But what am I to do?”
she asked. “I don’t understand what you mean by that word.”
“There!” exclaimed Mrs. O’Toole triumphantly. “I told you we had ought
to have waited for the letter.”
Miss Marie shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and turned to
Betty. “President Wallace said that he was willing, under the
circumstances----” Marie hesitated. “I suppose he meant my being
educated mostly in a convent, where they don’t prepare girls for
college, and being so ‘sot’ on coming, and so on. Anyway he said that
under the circumstances he was willing for me to enter with one more
condition than is strictly according to rules, if you would promise to
tutor me as you did another girl once, and to look after me generally,
and explain things that I don’t know about. He said he thought I would
find a lot of things at college that I didn’t know about.”
There was a long pause. Of all the embarrassing situations, Betty
thought, this was the worst. President Wallace was--it would be very
disrespectful to say what. Besides, Betty realized in spite of her
annoyance that President Wallace undoubtedly had had a good reason
for sending the O’Tooles out to spoil her lazy afternoon. Part of the
reason was probably because he had had to send them somewhere, or he
would have them still pleading with him to reconsider his decision.
Betty foresaw that Marie, being “sot,” would not give up easily; while
Mrs. O’Toole, wanting Marie to have what she wanted, would be equally
persistent. Betty decided that she needed a breathing space.
“I don’t know what to say,” she told them. “To begin with, I haven’t
fully decided to go back to Harding this winter. If I do go, I shall
be very, very busy with my regular work. I don’t really see how I can
do more than I have already arranged for. But before I decide, I must
wait for President Wallace’s letter. It may be about you, or it may be
partly about Morton Hall--the dormitory that I shall have charge of if
I go back. May I have a little time to consider? I really couldn’t say
anything but no, if I had to decide to-day.”
Mrs. O’Toole sighed and looked reproachfully at Marie. “I told you so,”
she complained. “You’re always in too much of a hurry. We might just as
well have taken things easy and enjoyed the ride. We came all the way
in our car, Miss Wales.”
“But I like to ride fast,” announced her daughter calmly. “Do you, Miss
Wales? Because, if we’re going to wait around here for that letter,
I’ll take you for a ride. Do many Harding girls have their own cars?”
Just then Tom Benson appeared on the piazza. Betty presented him, and
Marie promptly dazzled him with her smile and bore him off to a distant
corner of the piazza.
As soon as she was out of ear-shot, Mrs. O’Toole leaned forward in
her chair and addressed Betty earnestly. “Do it if you possibly can,”
she begged. “It’s a foolish notion she’s got that she wants to go to
college, but there ain’t anything bad about it. It ain’t as if she
wanted to go on the stage, or ride bareback in a circus, or marry some
good-for-nothing fellow that wants her for her money. So I’m awful
anxious for her to have her way. You see, Miss Wales, I know I stand in
her light some. I know I ain’t a lady, though I do dress perfect,” she
added proudly, “and look so young that people are always asking Marie
about her pretty older sister. But looks and money ain’t everything,
Miss Wales. And Marie is always so awful nice to me and her Pa, that we
aim to suit her as well as we can.”
“Did Mr. O’Toole come to America too?” asked Betty, for want of
anything better to say. She couldn’t help being touched by Mrs.
O’Toole’s plea, but she didn’t want Mrs. O’Toole to know it yet.
“Oh, he’s always in America,” explained Mrs. O’Toole, “out at the mine,
you know. But that’s no place for Marie, and her Pa knows it. He wants
her to have all the benefits fits of education and foreign travel. We
ought to be going, Miss Wales. Day after to-morrow, did you say? All
right. You’ve been awful kind, Miss Wales. Come, Marie, we must be
going.”
Marie came, slowly and reluctantly, with a backward smile for Tom
Benson, and a murmured, “To-morrow afternoon then, and we’re staying
in town at that big hotel with the queer German name.”
Betty watched them go as she might have watched the curtain dropping
on the last scene of a tragi-comical play. Tom Benson broke into her
revery with a laughing comment.
“Your friend Miss O’Toole is an accomplished little flirt, all right,”
he announced.
“She isn’t my friend,” Betty told him severely, “and it takes two to
flirt, Tom Benson. So, as a favor to me, you’re not to call on her
in town. You can come over here and see her day after to-morrow if
you want to. It looks to me as if I had been tumbled into the job of
chaperoning her through the first half of her freshman year at Harding,
so I propose to start her out right.”
“Why the first half of the freshman year only?” demanded Tom curiously.
“Because,” explained Betty, “mid-years come then--at Harding. Seems
to me I have heard that they come about the same time at Yale, but I
suppose they don’t worry a distinguished scholar like you.”
“The fair Marie doesn’t act particularly studious,” admitted Tom. “But
you can’t ever tell about these pretty college girls.” Tom smiled
meaningly at Betty, for whose brains he professed a vast admiration.
“Well, I wasn’t flunked out at freshman mid-years,” Betty told him,
“but if I didn’t think Miss Marie O’Toole would find half a year of
Harding all she wants, for one reason or another, I certainly shouldn’t
be contemplating acting as her special tutor.”
“Are you considering it?” demanded Tom in amazement.
Betty nodded calmly.
Tom whistled. “Then I bet you have your hands full.”
“Well, I certainly hate having them empty,” returned Betty, beginning
again on the stockings.