[Illustration: “NOW COME AND LABEL HER DRESSES”]
BETTY WALES, B. A.
_A STORY FOR GIRLS_
_BY_ MARGARET
WARDE
_Author of_
“Betty Wales, Freshman”
“Betty Wales, Sophomore”
“Betty Wales, Junior”
“Betty Wales, Senior”
_Illustrated by_
EVA M. NAGEL
_The Penn Publishing Company_
PHILADELPHIA MCMVIII
COPYRIGHT
1908 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY
Introduction
WHEN I first knew Betty Wales she was a freshman at Harding
College, with a sedate, comical roommate named Helen Chase Adams, and
a host of good friends, who stood by her and one another all through
the four years of their college course. Mary Brooks--afterward Mrs.
Hinsdale--was a sophomore when Betty entered college, but the others,
the three B’s, Roberta Lewis, Eleanor Watson, Rachel Morrison, and
Katherine Kittredge,--all belonged to the “finest class” of 19--. So
did Madeline Ayres, though she was a year late in joining it and felt
obliged to make up for lost time by being a particularly lively and
loyal Hardingite during her abbreviated course there. Georgia Ames
first appeared in 19--’s junior year, and joined “The Merry Hearts,”
a society that Betty and her friends had organized. But Georgia the
first, as Madeline used to call her, was only a figment of Madeline’s
imagination; it was a delightful coincidence when, at the end of the
year, a real Georgia Ames appeared to step into the place left vacant
by her departed namesake, whose short but strenuous career at Harding
had made them both famous.
All these things and many others may be found in the four books
entitled respectively “Betty Wales, Freshman,” “Betty Wales,
Sophomore,” “Betty Wales, Junior,” and “Betty Wales, Senior.” This
story was written because some of Betty’s friends were not satisfied to
leave her at the end of her senior year, but wished to hear what she
did next. If any of them still want to know what happened to her after
she came back from her trip abroad, why, perhaps some day they may.
MARGARET WARDE.
Contents
I. AN IMPROMPTU WEDDING--AND OTHER
IMPROMPTUS 9
II. A GOING-AWAY PARTY--HARDING
STYLE 27
III. OFF TO BONNIE SCOTLAND 44
IV. A DISILLUSIONMENT MADE GOOD 66
V. A RUIN AND A REUNION 88
VI. SCOTCH MISTS 110
VII. THE GHOST OF DUNSTAFFNAGE 129
VIII. BETTY DISCOVERS HER SPECIALTY 146
IX. BUYING A DUKE 166
X. THE GAY GHOSTS OF LONDON 185
XI. BETTY WALES, DETECTIVE 204
XII. JASPER J. MORTON AGAIN 221
XIII. A “NEAR-ADVENTURE” 236
XIV. A REAL ADVENTURE 258
XV. A NOISY PARISIAN GHOST 273
XVI. THE PROGRESS OF ROMANCE 293
XVII. TELLING THE MAGNATE 311
XVIII. HOME AGAIN 329
Illustrations
PAGE
“NOW COME AND LABEL HER DRESSES” _Frontispiece_
“IT’S ONLY FOR HER I’M CARIN’” 57
“COME UP, ALL OF YOU” 104
“FOUR AND SIX!” 179
“I HAVE MY DICTIONARY” 228
THE GIRLS POUNCED UPON HER 284
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED IN THE SECOND
BOAT 322
Betty Wales, B. A.
CHAPTER I
AN IMPROMPTU WEDDING--AND OTHER IMPROMPTUS
“WELL,” announced Betty Wales to the family breakfast table,
a week after 19--’s commencement, “I’m beginning to feel quite at home
again. I’ve got my room fixed----”
“So it looks as much like a Harding room as you can make it,” laughed
Nan.
“And you spend most of your time describing the lost glories of Harding
to anybody who will listen,” added Will.
“And the rest in writing long letters to the other ‘Merry Hearts,’” put
in mother slyly.
“And she plans what I’ll do when I go to college,” declared the
Smallest Sister, who had just had her first “teens birthday” and did
not propose to be excluded from any family council.
“In short,” said Mr. Wales, appearing solemnly from behind the morning
paper, “being ‘quite at home’ means wishing you were back at college.
Is that about the size of it, Miss Betty Wales?”
“Never, daddy,” cried Betty, leaning across the corner of the table to
give him a hug. “I’m just as glad as I can be to be really and truly at
home again with my family. Of course I shall miss the girls dreadfully,
but--oh, there the postman’s ring! I wonder if he’s got anything for
me.” And Betty danced off to the door, answering Nan’s and Will’s
chorused “I told you so!” with a laughing “I don’t care.” As Will had
once said, “The nicest thing about Betty is that she can’t possibly be
teased.”
She was back in a minute with a handful of letters for the family and
four for herself.
“All from late lamented Hardingites?” inquired Will, who never wrote
letters and therefore seldom got any to read over his morning coffee.
Betty was tearing open the second envelope. “That one isn’t. It’s
just congratulations on graduating, from Aunt Maria. But this is from
Madeline Ayres--why, how funny! It’s dated Monday, in New York, and
she was going to sail last Saturday. Oh, dear, I don’t understand at
all! She says”--Betty frowned despairingly over Madeline’s dainty,
unreadable hieroglyphics--“she says, ‘You have heard all about it by
this time, I suppose, and isn’t it just--just----’ Oh, I wish Madeline
could write plainly.”
“Too bad about these college graduates who can neither read nor write,”
said Will loftily. “Try the next one. Perhaps they’ll explain each
other. Isn’t that scrawly one in the blue envelope from Katherine
Kittredge?”
Betty nodded absently and tore open the blue envelope. “Why how funny!”
she cried. “K. begins just the very same way. ‘Of course you’ve
heard about it by this time, and isn’t it the nicest ever? Are you
and Roberta going to wear your commencement dresses too? Wasn’t it
exciting the way they caught Madeline on the wharf? By the way, both
the straps of my telescope broke on the way home, and so I’ve bought
a gorgeous leather bag to carry on this trip, without waiting for my
first salary. Dick lent me the money--you know he’s been working this
winter, so that I could stay at Harding, and they never told me a word
about it. We’re planning for his college course now, father and I, and
I couldn’t have gone a step to the wedding if dear old Mary hadn’t sent
the ticket.’ Gracious!” interpolated Betty excitedly, “what is she
talking about? Dick’s her brother. That hasn’t anything to do with the
rest of the letter.” She glanced at the last envelope. “Oh, this is
from Mary Brooks. I hope it won’t be puzzle number three.”
It wasn’t. Betty read it all through to herself--four closely written
pages--while the Wales family, who had all become interested by this
time, watched her cheeks growing pinker and her eyes brighter and
bigger with excitement, as she read. At the end she gave a rapturous
little sigh. “Oh, it’s just perfectly lovely!” she declared.
“What?” demanded Will.
“Oh, everything,” answered Betty vaguely. “Mary’s going to be married a
week from to-day, and we’re all coming,--every single one of us. She
caught Madeline before she went abroad, and Eleanor before she left for
Denver, and she’s sent tickets to K. and Rachel and Helen, instead of
giving us all bridesmaids’ presents. Oh, father dear, may I go?”
Mr. Wales smiled into his daughter’s flushed, happy face. “Betty,” he
said, “your enthusiasm is delightful. We shall miss it while you are
gone, but if Mary--whoever she may be--is going to be married and can’t
have it done properly without you, why we shall have to drift along for
another week in our accustomed state of staid and placid calm.”
And Betty was so excited and so busy explaining to her father which one
of all the girls he met at Harding was Mary Brooks, and which one of
the faculty was Dr. Hinsdale, that she never noticed the letter from
Babbie Hildreth, in her father’s mail, or the dainty, scented note,
also postmarked Pelham Manor, which her mother read and covertly passed
to Nan and then to Mr. Wales. And after breakfast she flew straight
up-stairs to answer her letters, never dreaming that the long talk
father and mother and Nan were having on the piazza just underneath
her windows was all about her--Betty Wales--and the reasons why she
should or should not go on the most glorious summer trip that a girl
ever took.
“Well, I’ll see,” father called back from the gate, as he hurried off
to his office at last, and Betty smiled to herself and wondered whether
Nan wanted a set of new books or the Smallest Sister a bicycle. “Father
always says that when he thinks you’re getting pretty extravagant in
your tastes, but still he’s going to let you have it all the same,”
reflected Betty, and started for the third time to reread Mary’s letter.
“Dearest Betty,” it began, “I’ve left you till the last to write to
because you aren’t going to the ends of the earth within the week,
and you don’t take ages to make up your mind to things. In short, my
child, I know that this impromptu wedding idea will appeal to you and
that you will keep your promise to help Roberta do the bridesmaid act
just as nicely as if I’d told you six weeks ahead instead of one, and
then sent you a neatly engraved invitation at the proper hour and
minute. We want to be married next Thursday at three, because--oh,
dear, here comes George Garrison Hinsdale this minute, and I promised
to be ready to take him to call on my minister. I’ll tell you why we
changed our minds when I see you. You and Roberta and Laurie are to
stay with me, and the others are invited to Tilly Root’s, just across
the street. There’s a dinner Wednesday night, before the rehearsal.
Oh, about clothes,--just wear your graduating dress or anything else
that you and Roberta agree upon. Let me know your train. Oh, and you
won’t draw a present, because I wanted all the girls to come, so I
sent tickets to K. and Rachel and Helen. I hope they won’t feel hurt,
and that you won’t mind not having diamond sunbursts to remember
the occasion by. You see I couldn’t give diamond sunbursts to some
and railroad tickets to others. It would have spoiled the scheme of
decoration.
“I wanted to tell you how I caught Madeline’s coat-tails just as she
was going on board her boat, but George Garrison Hinsdale refuses
to wait another second. I foresee that I have drawn a tyrannical
husband. And the moral of that is,--I’m too happy to care.
“Yours ever,
“MARY.”
Before she wrote to Mary, Betty puzzled out most of Madeline’s letter,
which gave an amusing account of her sudden change of plans. “Eleanor
came to see me off,” she wrote, “and Dick Blake was there with his arms
full of flowers for me and his eyes fastened tight to Eleanor, and all
the good Bohemians were saying fond farewells and sending messages to
daddy and telling when they’d probably turn up in Sorrento, when up
dashed Mary Brooks and her professor. And in five minutes Dick had sold
my cabin to a man he knew who had come down on the chance of getting
one and that boat had sailed without me and my flowers and my steamer
trunk and my ‘carry-all-and-more-too’; and my weeping chaperon that
I had not yet wasted time in hunting up is probably sending wireless
messages of condolence to my family this minute. But Dr. Hinsdale
cabled, and then Dick took the whole crowd to a roof-garden to cool
off, and after that he and I went down the Bowery giving away that
armful of roses to the smallest, raggedest children we could find.
So it was a very nice party, and of course I can go to Italy any
time. MAD.”
* * * * *
And this is how it happened that just two weeks after they had parted,
bravely trying not to show that they cared, “The Merry Hearts,”--or
at least the Chapin House division of them, with the B’s thrown in
for full measure,--met, one sultry July afternoon, on Mary’s big,
vine-shaded piazza and, chattering like magpies, drank inordinate
quantities of lemonade and iced tea and heard from the bride-to-be all
the whys and wherefores of her impromptu wedding.
“Haven’t I told any of you why we changed?” asked Mary. “No, Babe, it
wasn’t because we hadn’t the strength of mind to wait till August. It
was because my Uncle Marcellus gave us a desert island up on the Maine
Coast for a wedding present. Roberta, pass the cookies to yourself,
please.”
“Query,” propounded K. gaily. “When given a desert island for a
wedding present is it obligatory to take possession instantly or
forever after keep away?”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Mary severely. “It was this way, don’t you
see. The island has a gorgeous camp on it, and of course we want to go
there for our honeymoon, and why shouldn’t we start early and stay all
summer? If we had waited until the middle of August, as we planned,
that desert island would have gone to waste for one whole month.”
“Which would ill become the desert island of a psychology professor,”
declared Madeline. “Who says that the college girl doesn’t bring
intellect to bear on the practical affairs of life?”
“Hear, hear!” cried Bob, waving her lemonade glass. “Here’s to the
college bride, who lets no desert island waste its sweetness on the
empty air! Here’s to the impromptu wedding! Here’s to the first ‘Merry
Heart’ reunion! Here’s----”
“Hush, Bob,” Babbie protested. “You’re disgracing the bridal party in
the eyes of the neighborhood. Take us up to see the trousseau, Mary,
please.”
“I’ll bet there’s nothing very impromptu about that,” declared Babe.
“Oh, girls, I hope you’ll like it,” began Mary anxiously, leading
the way indoors. “I’ve positively worn myself out trying to have it
right--right for a Harding professor’s wife, I mean.”
“Picture Mary looking twenty in pink chiffon, being a patroness at the
junior prom,” cried K., picking up the small bride and standing her in
a piazza chair.
“Picture Mary behind an armful of violets, sitting on the stage at the
big game, trying to remember that she’s Mrs. Professor Hinsdale and
mustn’t shriek for the purple,” added Rachel.
“Picture Mary in a velvet suit and a picture hat, making her first
calls on the faculty,” jeered Bob.
“When she’s fairly pining to go snow-shoeing with her little friends in
the senior class,” added Babe convincingly.
“Stop teasing her,” commanded Betty, helping Mary down from her lofty
perch. “She’ll be the nicest professor’s wife that ever was--see if she
isn’t! Now come and label her dresses for the proper occasions.”
It was most absorbing--deciding what Mary should wear to faculty
parties, to college lectures, to the president’s dinners--“Just to
think of being invited to dinner at Prexie’s!” said little Helen Adams
in awed tones--“to house plays, to senior dramatics, and to all the
other important functions of the college year.” It took a long time,
too, because of course such delicate questions couldn’t be decided
without seeing Mary in each dress, and getting “the exact combination
of youth, beauty, and dignity that resulted,” as K., who explained that
she was practising “school-ma’am English,” put it.
And then there were so many digressions. It was only two weeks since
they had separated at Harding, but in the meanwhile a great deal seemed
to have happened. Helen had accepted a position to teach English in her
home high school. Eleanor was to join her family after the wedding for
a hastily planned trip through the Canadian Rockies. Most exciting of
all, Bob had actually established her fresh-air colony.
“It’s great,” she declared. “When I asked father if I might have some
slum children out for two weeks he thought I was joking, so he said
yes, and when those six dirty little ragamuffins suddenly dawned upon
his vision last Saturday night he was furious. But I coaxed a little,
and I got him to give the boys a Fourth of July oration, and when
Jimmie Scheverin hopped up and solemnly thanked him for his unique and
inspiring address, he gave in. He’s staying at home now to look after
things while I’m gone. He said he guessed Wall Street could get along
without him.”
“But if they’re only going to stay two weeks, Bob,” began Babe hastily,
“I don’t see why----” She stopped in sudden confusion.
“Why what?” demanded Katherine curiously.
“Oh, why I’ve talked such a lot about it, she means,” explained Bob
calmly. “When these leave there are others coming, Babe. There’s an
unlimited supply of fresh-air children,--millions of them. That’s why
we can’t keep Jimmie Scheverin more than two weeks, in spite of his
enthusiasm for father’s oratory and father’s enthusiasm for Jimmie. So
it’s no use trying to persuade me to go off on frivolous trips with
you.”
“Where are you going, Babe?” asked Betty idly.
“Oh, I don’t know that I’m going anywhere,” said Babe, with a conscious
little giggle. “Where are you?”
Betty explained that they were going to have a cottage for a month or
two at some seaside place near New York--it hadn’t been decided when
she left home, but father was going to write her. This information the
B’s and Madeline received with solicitous and solemn interest. Indeed
they asked Betty so many questions, that Mary finally declared her
wedding was being shamefully neglected.
“I don’t know about the wedding,” said Mrs. Brooks, appearing at that
minute, “but the groom is on the piazza, and six presents have come----”
In the rush down-stairs that followed Babbie pulled Babe into a corner.
“You’ll let the cat out of the bag if you’re not more careful,” she
declared reproachfully.
“I will be more careful,” Babe promised. “But why doesn’t her father
hurry up and decide? I shall burst if I can’t talk about it pretty
soon.”
“The loveliest old brass samovar,” cried Eleanor.
“From Miss Ferris!” added Betty. “That makes it all the nicer.”
“And a silver dish from Prexie and Mrs. Prexie.”
“That’s what you get for marrying a faculty.”
“Isn’t it distinguished?” said Babbie, rushing after the others. “I
don’t see how you can think of anything else, Babe.”
“Well, I don’t go abroad every summer the way you do,” explained Babe
breathlessly. “The most distinguished wedding that ever happened
couldn’t make me forget that I’m going to see Paris and London and all
the rest of Europe.”
“Not quite all, I hope,” laughed Babbie, hurrying to shake hands with
Dr. Hinsdale and Marion Lawrence, who was going to be Mary’s maid of
honor.
Everybody agreed that Mary’s impromptu wedding was a decided
improvement upon the usual cut-and-dried variety. There was certainly
nothing cut and dried about it. When the sun had gone below the tops
of the tall elm trees on the lawn and the shadows fell, long and
cool, on the velvety grass, Mary appeared on the piazza, wearing a
soft white dress--“that didn’t look a bit like a wedding,” as little
Helen Adams announced with her customary frankness. First she kissed
her mother and patted her father’s shoulder lovingly, just as she
did every morning before breakfast, and then she shook hands with
everybody else, as unconcernedly as if it was no day in particular and
all her dearest friends had merely happened to drop in for afternoon
tea. But all at once, before anybody except the people concerned had
noticed it, there was a cleared space in one corner, with a screen of
ferns and white sweet peas for a background. Laurie and Roberta and
Betty were close behind Mary, her father and Dr. Hinsdale were beside
her, the “near-bridesmaids” and “near-ushers,” as K. had flippantly
dubbed the rest of the bridal party, made a half circle around the
others, and Mary Brooks, with one great white rose in her hand and
a half-frightened, half-happy little smile on her lips, was being
married to George Garrison Hinsdale.
When it was over, everybody went indoors and had all sorts of cooling
things to eat and drink. Meanwhile the bridesmaids, and “near-brides”
had slipped away to put on some Roumanian peasant costumes, and “the
next number on the program”--according to Katherine--was some curious
wedding dances that Roberta had learned and taught to the others. Some
were graceful and some were amusing, and the music was so gay that it
made everybody feel like dancing too. And that was what they did, by
the soft light of Japanese lanterns, until it was time to fill one’s
hands with confetti and old slippers and speed the wedding-pair on
their way to the desert island that would not be deserted any more that
summer.
As the girls sat on the piazza talking it all over with Mrs. Brooks,
who declared she simply couldn’t realize that “little Mary” was old
enough to be getting married, Dr. Brooks came out, bringing a letter
for Betty.
“Don’t ask me how long I’ve had it in my pocket, Miss Betty,” he said
with a twinkle in his eyes. “It beats everything how a wedding does
upset me.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” laughed Betty, “as long as you’ve remembered
it in time for me to know where I’m going to-morrow. It’s from father,
telling me which cottage they’ve taken. Will you excuse me if I read it
right now, Mrs. Brooks?”
The next minute Betty gave a little shriek of delight, dropped her
letter, and seizing Babbie’s hands whirled her madly down the length of
the piazza. Finally she dropped breathlessly down on the broad railing,
pulling Babbie to a seat beside her.
“Isn’t it just too elegant for anything!” she sighed. “And to think how
near Babe came to telling, and I never guessed a thing.”