THE INTERVENTION OF JIM
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.
“_Mr. James Watson_,
“DEAR SIR:
“You didn’t do a very good job on Morton Hall. There is a lot of
waste space under the ceilings of the closets. They are also too
small. So are the double rooms. The halls are too narrow when there
are trunks around. I have fixed my closet. I think it would help you
in your work to see how I did it.
“Miss Wales, whom I believe you know, acts rather tired these days.
“Yours respectfully,
“MARIE O’TOOLE,
“A Morton Hallite.”
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.”
[Illustration: “I’VE PASSED OFF MY ENTRANCE LATIN”]
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.