BETTY WALES, JUNIOR
_A STORY FOR GIRLS_
_BY_ MARGARET WARDE
_Author of_
"Betty Wales, Freshman," "Betty Wales, Sophomore," etc.
_Illustrated by_ EVA M. NAGEL
_The Penn Publishing Company_ PHILADELPHIA MCMVI
COPYRIGHT 1906 BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY
Betty Wales, Junior
[Illustration: "TOSS IT OVER, PLEASE," SAID MADELINE]
Contents
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7
I THE FUN OF JUNIOR YEAR 9
II THE CLUB OF MERRY HEARTS 24
III THE BEGINNING OF GEORGIA AMES 39
IV GEORGIA WIDENS HER SPHERE 52
V GEORGIA BECOMES A "MERRY HEART" 72
VI A TOUCH OF STYLE AND SOME OTHER TOUCHES 87
VII "THE MERRY HEARTS" FIND WORK TO DO 101
VIII DR. EATON FINDS HIMSELF MISTAKEN 124
IX DR. EATON GROWS MAJESTIC 145
X THE UNDOING OF GEORGIA 161
XI A NEW EXCITEMENT 178
XII "THE MERRY HEARTS" CONSPIRE 195
XIII "THE MERRY HEARTS" ABROAD 211
XIV EASTER IN NASSAU 235
XV A RÔLE FOR THE HERO 257
XVI BACK TO WORK 276
XVII HELEN'S DAY--AND ELEANOR'S 293
XVIII A DRESS REFORM AND A NASSAU REUNION 308
XIX THE RETURN OF GEORGIA AND SOME
OTHER MATTERS 330
Illustrations
PAGE
"TOSS IT OVER, PLEASE," SAID MADELINE _Frontispiece_
"GEORGIA AMES DOESN'T CUT," SAID MADELINE 58
IT CERTAINLY WAS NOT ENGLISH 115
THE GIRLS WORKED VALIANTLY 208
HE WAS THE FIRST ONE TO SEE HER 217
AT THE DOOR OF HELEN'S ROOM SHE HESITATED 303
THE NASSAU PARTY MET BY MARY'S HAMMOCK 319
Betty Wales Junior
INTRODUCTION
Girls who have not followed the adventures of Betty Wales and her
friends during their freshman and sophomore years at Harding College
may enjoy a bit of an introduction to the circle, before beginning
the story of their doings as juniors. Jolly, happy-go-lucky Katherine
Kittredge; Rachel Morrison, as steady and dependable as Katherine was
volatile; shy, sensitive Roberta Lewis; Eleanor Watson, beautiful,
but not a general favorite; forlorn little Helen Adams, and Betty
Wales were freshmen together at Mrs. Chapin's. Mary Brooks, the only
sophomore in the house, did her best to make life a burden to them in
the amusing but innocent fashion that hazing takes at Harding. The
good times they all had together and Betty's trials with Helen Adams,
who fell to her lot as roommate, and with Eleanor Watson, whom she
admired for her cleverness and over whom she managed to exert a strong
influence for good, are recounted in "Betty Wales, Freshman."
When they were sophomores most of the Chapin House girls moved to
the campus, where they were distributed among the various college
dwelling-houses, there to find new interests and make new friends.
Chief among the latter was Madeline Ayres, the girl from "Bohemia, New
York," whose original and always artistic ideas for everything from
political parades and vaudeville shows to the arrangement of a room
and the soothing of an irate editor won her vast popularity. Another
important addition was Dora Carlson--Eleanor Watson's freshman she
was called, from her dog-like devotion to Eleanor. Dora and Betty
between them, with some help from Madeline and some from Miss Ferris,
a friend on the college faculty, kept Eleanor from utterly ruining her
career at Harding. A story not her own that she printed in the college
magazine made no end of trouble for Eleanor and her friends, but in
spite of that the sophomore year was a merry one. Indeed I think that
Betty Wales and her set entered upon their junior year with the firm
conviction that you couldn't help having a good time at Harding--even
if you tried.
MARGARET WARDE.
Betty Wales, Junior
CHAPTER I
THE FUN OF JUNIOR YEAR
"Hello, Betty Wales. Please amuse me."
Betty was sitting on the floor of her own long-coveted "single,"
surrounded by a bewildering array of her possessions, which she had
unpacked according to her own particular system of taking everything
out at once, and now, as usual, she had no idea where to dispose of
them. At the sound of the voice, the unwonted pucker of anxiety left
her forehead, and she jumped up, scattering the photographs she had
been sorting right and left, and made a rush for the newcomer.
"Oh, Mary Brooks! Maybe I'm not glad to see you. I'm--I think I'm
homesick."
Mary grinned cheerfully. "You ought to be used to it by this time--to
the joys of being back on time, I mean. It's I that have reasons for
feeling like a little lost lamb. Do you know, this is positively my
first appearance at the regular opening functions."
"Really?" laughed Betty. "What's going to happen?"
"Nothing new, I hope," said Mary; "but Miss Stuart delicately hinted
that the wrath of Jove would descend upon me if I didn't get here on
time. Where's everybody?"
"I don't know," said Betty sadly. "Didn't you come on the
eight-fifteen?"
"I did," returned Mary with decision. "Ever since I entered college I
have heard about the joyousness of coming up on the eight-fifteen on an
opening night. And now I get here on time for once, and the New York
and the western trains are all fiendishly late. So I come up alone in
my glory on that famous eight-fifteen, and instead of a gay and festive
occasion such as I have been led to expect, I find an empty house--not
a soul but you to talk to, and positively nothing doing. They seem to
be all new girls on my corridor."
"I don't think you ought to refer to freshmen as an empty house," said
Betty severely, "and anyhow it serves you right for all the times you
have cut over."
"When did you come?" asked Mary, apparently considering that one
topic had been pursued far enough. "You haven't done all this"--she
indicated the miscellaneous results of Betty's unpacking by a sweeping
gesture--"in just this one evening?"
"Rather not," said Betty. "Mary, I've been here two whole days--not in
the Belden of course, because it wasn't open, but in Harding; and I
think that if you hadn't come just when you did, I should have--cried,"
ended Betty, in a sudden burst of confidence.
"You poor thing!" said Mary sympathetically. "I suppose it was a
freshman cousin or something."
Betty nodded. "Lucile Merrifield. She's a dear, and she said she didn't
need me one bit, but her mother and my mother settled it that I was to
come. And of course Lucile was busy with her exams. and I didn't have
anything to do all day but sit around and think what a lovely summer
I'd been having. And that horrid woman we stayed with thought I was the
freshman and asked me right before a whole tableful of them if I was
homesick--just because Lucile happens to be tall and dignified, and her
hair is straight." Betty gave a vicious pull to the yellow curl that
would escape from its companions and fall over her eyes.
Mary grinned sympathetically. "Too bad about your childish ringlets,"
she said. "But I'll bet your cousin isn't a circumstance to mine--the
eighth one from Wisconsin that came on for her examinations last June.
Was yours the weeping kind?"
"Weeping!" repeated Betty, laughing at the idea of the stately Lucile
dissolved in tears. "Not much. She was so calm and cool that I thought
she must have flunked and was trying to cover it up. She had five
examinations, Mary, and they might have been five afternoon teas for
all she seemed to care; and she isn't a dig or a prod, or anything
of that kind, either. So I got worried and made her go all over the
questions with me. As far as I could see, she did awfully well. Anyhow
I don't believe she can possibly have flunked."
"What a good idea!" said Mary admiringly. "I'm afraid I didn't take a
serious enough view of my responsibilities last spring. But then the
eighth cousin was perfectly hopeless and it was a mercy to everybody
concerned that she failed. She was the kind of person that would rather
risk making a bad break than leave anything out. In her English exam.
they asked her what a leviathan was,--it's mentioned in 'Paradise
Lost,' you know,--and she said 'a country near Thrace.' I think myself
that was her finish. It doesn't do to be so positive unless you know
you're in the right."
"I don't believe it's ever best to be positive," said Betty sadly. "I
was so positive that I wanted a single room, and now I've got one, and
I'm missing Helen Chase Adams already."
"Oh, you'll like it when you're settled," Mary reassured her, glancing
around the room. "Why do you have all the chiffonier drawers open at
once?"
"They stick," explained Betty savagely, "every blessed one of them.
I've got them all open now except the bottom one, but it took me almost
an hour, and I'm not going to risk having to do it all over again. And
almost every one of the hooks in the closet is broken, so I can't hang
up my dresses; and look at the spots on that wall!"
Mary squinted near-sightedly at the black stains. "Jane Drew must have
had a quarrel with one of her pictures and thrown an ink bottle at it,"
she said. "I wonder how she covered up the tragedy. I never noticed
those spots last year."
"She must have had a very big picture," said Betty. "My biggest Gibson
girl won't do it. And my desk won't go into that corner where Jane had
hers."
"Number twenty-seven must have shrunk during the summer," said Mary.
"I hope my palatial apartment hasn't lost any of its six by ten
spaciousness."
There was a long pause. "Mary," began Betty at last, "are you tired or
are you blue?"
"Blue," declared Mary savagely, "blue as a heron. (Did we ever find one
in the Mary-Bird-Club, Betty?) I wondered if you'd notice it. I hate
being a senior. I know it's going to be perfectly deadly--this seeing
the last of things. How do you like being a junior?"
Betty hesitated. "Mary, does it always last,--the fun of college? Did
you ever know a girl who'd been very, very fond of it for two years to
get tired of it all of a sudden?"
"Never," said Mary decidedly. "That's just what the girls I used to
know at home are always asking me. 'Why do you stay on so long, Mary?
Don't you get bored?' And when I try to explain, I suppose they think
it all sounds very dull. I presume I should think so myself, if I
hadn't been here to see. One year is a good deal like the ones before
it,--the same friends, only a few more each year, the same nice little
stunts, and almost the same things to try for,--but somehow each one
is different and there's plenty of excitement all along the road.
If you're afraid of outgrowing it, as you would a prep. school, you
needn't be. College is too big to be outgrown. It has a new side ready
for any new side that you can develop. I say, Betty."
"Yes?" inquired Betty absently. She was wondering how Mary had guessed
that she had developed some new sides during the long vacation.
"I thought perhaps you'd like to know, since you're so fond of Eleanor
Watson. More or less about that affair of hers last year has leaked out
during the summer."
"You mean----" faltered Betty.
"I mean about the story she signed her name to in the 'Argus' and
didn't exactly write. I don't know the details, except that you were
mixed up in it somehow; but I think she did the very square thing when
she resigned from Dramatic Club, and I mean to stand by her, and so
does Laurie. Eleanor was on the train to-night, and some of the girls
rather turned the cold shoulder. I thought--you might like to know
right away how matters stood."
"Thank you," said Betty soberly, "but I don't believe she'll need me
much now, Mary. I think she's learned how to help herself."
"That's lucky," said Mary easily. "Now Roberta Lewis doesn't seem to
get one bit more independent. I'm afraid she's never going to be very
happy here. She ought to go in hard for writing; I know she'd make a
success of it."
"Tell her so," advised Betty. "She adores you, and now that you're on
the 'Argus' staff you certainly ought to be able to influence her."
"I suppose I ought," conceded Mary. "The trouble is I've never really
seen much that she wrote except those valentine verses that she did
for us in her freshman year, and she says those were mostly French
translations. So when I tell her that I know she can write, she says
I'm prejudiced and haven't any good reason for thinking so. She hasn't
one bit of self-confidence."
There was a thump and then a thud in the hall. A door banged, somebody
shrieked, "Oh, Polly, you darling child!" and then Katherine Kittredge
burst into Betty's room like a whirlwind, dragging Roberta Lewis after
her.
"We're just this minute in," she panted, "on a special that they sent
up from the junction, because they couldn't bear to have us sitting
around the waiting-room down there breaking the ten o'clock rule.
Roberta fairly insisted that I should come here first. How's everything
starting off?"
"I insisted!" repeated Roberta indignantly. "K. was in such a hurry
to get here that she wouldn't wait for a car, and there wasn't any
carriage, and my suit case weighs a ton."
"Well, I carried it," retorted Katherine, fanning herself with the
biggest Gibson girl. "And Mary, you should have seen the elegant
Roberta, lugging my handsome telescope."
"Did you know that we'd voted a class-tax to buy you a sole-leather
suit case lined with white satin?" inquired Mary Brooks. Katherine's
battered canvas bag was a college joke.
"Glad to hear it, I'm sure," returned Katherine serenely. "Where's
Rachel?"
"Coming," called a merry voice, and Rachel herself appeared in the
doorway and was dragged in, amid great enthusiasm.
"When did you come, Rachel?" asked Betty, leading her to a seat of
honor on the window-box.
"At four," said Rachel, "but I've been tutoring conditioned freshmen
ever since."
"You poor thing!" sighed Mary.
"Not a bit," laughed Rachel. "My pocketbook is fairly bursting.
Besides, they were dears, all of them. One took me to supper at
Holmes's, so she could get more time for her math., and we talked cube
root and binomial theorem over the most delicious chicken salad."
Rachel was still economizing at the little white house around the
corner, but she was too happy at finding herself back in Harding again
to feel one bit of envy for the campus girls, who never had to worry
over finances, or plan how to make both ends meet.
The four were still all talking at once when Madeline Ayres appeared.
"No room for under-class men," shouted Mary, brandishing a pillow.
"Toss it over, please," said Madeline, complacently, holding out one
arm for the pillow and hugging Betty with the other. "I'll sit on it
here by the door and keep them out. This is where the French I passed
up last fall begins to count. I'm a junior now, if you please."
"Hear, hear!" cried Katherine. "Good for 19--! You always belonged to
us in spirit, Madeline."
"Helen Adams has come. Let's go call on her," suggested Rachel, and
they trooped off down the hall.
Their progress was slow, for out of almost every door excited damsels
swooped down upon them, wishing to shake hands all around and to talk
about everything, from where you spent your summer to the new man who
was going to teach English "Lit.," you know, and his courses would be
just splendid because--and do you suppose we shall ever get our trunks?
Betty met them all with an enthusiasm which soon ceased to be feigned.
The spirit of the place was contagious. It caught her up and swept her
along until all her woes were forgotten or turned into merry jests.
"I'll lend you a real French poster to cover those spots," Madeline
promised her, "and I can put up closet-hooks. I took manual training
one summer, and I own a hammer."
"Then let's go down-town and buy the hooks," suggested some one, "and
have ices on the way back."
"Oh, wait till to-morrow. Let's hunt up Eleanor Watson first."
"Where are the three B's?"
"Has any one seen Nita Reese?"
How the evening flew! Nobody in 19-- unpacked. It was much better fun
to wander in gay exploring parties from one campus house to another,
finding out who was back, and who had changed rooms, and hearing all
the campus news. The reason why junior year is the nicest speedily
became evident to Betty and her friends of 19--. By that time you know
everybody and have found your place in the college world; but you
are not yet weighed down by the responsibilities of seniority, nor
oppressed by the nearness of the end.
When Betty returned to her disheveled apartment at ten o'clock, she
found her Cousin Lucile sitting on the window-box in the dark, awaiting
her arrival.
"My dear little freshman," she began in the most patronizing tone she
could manage, "don't you know it's high time you were safe in bed?"
"Yes," said Lucile calmly, "but I had to consult you, Betty. I have
a chance to get into this house. A Miss Reeve or Reed or something
telegraphed the registrar that she was going to the Philippines to be
married, and I can have her place. It's a double room, but----"
"Not T. Reed?" cried Betty.
"I think her name was Theresa. Is her room----"
Betty dashed into the hall. "Girls," she cried to the avenue of open
doors, "T. Reed's going to be married to a Filipino--well, anyhow, in
the Philippines."
Then she returned to Lucile, leaving her bomb to take effect as it
might. "It will be lovely to have you in the house," she said, "and the
campus is certainly the place to be. I wonder if Helen knows that T.'s
not coming. If so, she must have had a telegram since I saw her."
"But Betty," began Lucile doubtfully, "I want to find out about Miss
Reed's room and her roommate."
"Oh, they're all right," broke in Betty. "I had them last year. The
closet is awfully small, but next year perhaps you can have a single."
"But Betty," persisted Lucile, "this is a serious matter to me. Are you
sure I shall like her?"
"Come and see," laughed Betty, starting for the door. "It's ten now
and you'll be locked in, but as long as you're here you may as well
stay with me to-night and see how we live on the campus. But then,"
she turned back to add, "it's not so important, Lucile,--your liking
her or not. You can't help liking college, roommate or no roommate,
closet-hooks or no closet-hooks. (I haven't any of those yet. That's
why my room is in such a mess,--or at least it's one reason.)" She
gave a long sigh of content. "Oh, Lucile, this is the grandest place,
especially if you live up here on the campus."
Mary Brooks came through the hall just in time to catch Betty's last
sentence.
"Why, Betty Wales," she said severely, "what do you mean by talking
like that? You told me not two hours ago that you were horribly bored."
Betty laughed. "So I was," she said, "two hours ago. I was sure that
all the fun was over."
"And the moral of that," said Mary, "is: Don't judge of the ball until
it has opened. Introduce me to your cousin, please, and then both of
you are elected to come and help me eat five pounds of caramels."