“Don’t be making invidious remarks, Judy,” put in Katherine. “Learn to see the beautiful in all things, even complexions.”
In the meantime Margaret Wakefield, looking five years older than her real age because of her matured figure and self-possessed air, was shaking hands all around, making an appropriate remark with each greeting, like the politician she was; and Jessie Lynch was crying in heartbroken tones:
“I left a box of candy and a bunch of violets and two new magazines on the train!”
“Where’s my little freshman?” Molly demanded of the other girls above the din and racket.
“There she is,” Judy pointed out. “But there is no hurry. Every bus is jammed full.”
The lonely freshman was standing pressed against the wall of the waiting room looking hopelessly on while the usual mob besieged Mr. Murphy, baggage master.
“Why, the poor little thing,” cried Molly, rushing to take the girl under her wing.
“It’s astonishing how one good deed starts another,” thought Nance, looking about her for other stranded freshies; and both the Williamses were doing the same thing.
There were several such lonely souls wandering about like lost spirits. They had been jostled and pushed this way and that in the crowd, and one little girl was on the point of shedding tears.
“I can always tell a new girl by the wild light in her eye,” observed Edith Williams, making for an unhappy looking young person who had given up in despair and was sitting on her suit case.
At last they were all bundled into one of the larger buses from the livery stable. The older girls were thrilled with expectant joy while they watched eagerly for the first glimpse of the twin gray towers; the new girls, most of them, gazed sadly the other way, as if home lay behind them.
“It isn’t a case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here,’” observed Judy to a dejected freshman who in five minutes had lost all interest in her college career. “Look at us blooming creatures and you’ll see what it can do. There’s no end to the fun of it and no end to the things you’ll learn besides mere book knowledge.”
“I suppose so,” said the girl, struggling to keep back her tears, “but it’s a little lonesome at first.”
“Poor little souls,” thought Molly, who had overheard with much pride Judy’s eulogy of college, “how can we explain it to them? They’ll just have to find it out themselves as we did before them.”
The truth is, our new juniors felt quite motherly and old.
A hushed silence fell over the Queen’s girls when the bus drove by the grass-grown plot where once had stood their college home.
“If a dear friend had been buried there, we couldn’t have felt more solemn,” Molly wrote her sister that night.
But the prestige felt in alighting finally at the great arched entrance to the Quadrangle drove away all sad thoughts, and when they hastened down the long polished corridor to their rooms, they could not quench the pride which rose in their breasts. It was the real thing at last. Queen’s and O’Reilly’s had been great fun, but this was college. They were the true daughters of Wellington now, and that night when the gates clicked together at ten, they would sleep for the first time behind her gray stone walls.
At that moment the voices of a hundred-odd other daughters hummed through the halls, but it was all a part of the college atmosphere, as Judy said.
Their bedrooms were not quite as large as the old Queen’s rooms, but oh, the sitting room! They viewed it with pride. Each of the three had contributed something toward additional furniture. The piano was Judy’s; the divan, Nance’s; and the cushions, yet to be unpacked, Molly’s. There was another contribution not made by any of the three. It was the beautiful Botticelli photograph left for Molly by Mary Stewart, who had gone to Europe for the winter.
“How glad I am the walls are pale yellow and the woodwork white!” exclaimed Judy joyfully.
“How glad I am there’s plenty of room on these shelves for everybody’s books,” said Nance.
“And how glad I am to be a junior and back at old Wellington,” finished Molly, squeezing a hand of each friend.
CHAPTER II.
MINERVA HIGGINS
“There’s only one thing worse than a faculty call-down and that’s a Beta Phi freeze-out,” remarked Judy Kean one Saturday afternoon a few weeks after the opening day of college.
“Why do you bring up disagreeable subjects, Judy? Have you been getting a call-down?” asked Katherine Williams.
“Not your old Aunty Judy,” replied the other. “I’m far too wise for that after two years’ experience, but I saw some one else get one of the most flattening, extinguishing, crushing call-downs ever received by an inmate of this asylum for young ladies. And they do tell me it was followed soon after by another one.”
“Do tell,” exclaimed an interested chorus.
“It was that fresh Miss Higgins from Ohio,” continued Judy, with some enjoyment of the curiosity she was exciting. “You know she’s always trying to attract the attention of the masses – ”
“We being the masses,” interrupted Edith.
“And stand in the limelight. She’s bright, I hear, very bright, but she knows it.”
“I recognized her type almost immediately,” said Katherine. “She’s one of those brightest-girls-in-the-high-school-pride-of-the-town kind.”
“Exactly,” answered Judy. “She has been regarded as a prodigy for so long that she doesn’t understand the relative difference between a freshman and a senior. I honestly believe she thought everybody in Wellington knew all about her, and she wears as many gold medals on her chest as a field marshal on dress parade.”
“We saw the gold medals on Sunday,” interposed Molly. “I think it’s rather pathetic, myself. She is more to be pitied than scorned, because of course she doesn’t know any better.”
“She’ll have to live and learn, then,” said Judy.
“Get to the point of your story, Judy. Who extinguished her?” ejaculated Margaret Wakefield, impatient of such slipshod methods of narration.
“How can I tell a tale when I’m interrupted by forty people at once?” exclaimed Judy. “Besides, I haven’t the gift of language like you, old suffragette.”
Margaret laughed. She was entirely good-natured over the jibes of her friends about her passion for universal suffrage.
“Well, the Beta Phi crowd of seniors,” went on Judy, “were walking across the campus in a row. I don’t suppose Miss Higgins had any way to know this soon in the game that they represented the triple extract of concentrated exclusiveness at Wellington. Anyhow, she knows it now. She came rushing up behind them and gave Rosomond a light, friendly slap on the back. If you could have seen Rosomond’s face! But Miss Higgins was entirely dense. She began something about ‘Hello, girls, have you heard the news about Prexy – ’ but she never got any further. Rosomond gave her the most freezing look I ever saw from a human eye.”
“What did she say?”
“That was it. She never said anything. Nobody said anything. Eloise Blair carries tortoise-shell lorgnettes – ”
“She doesn’t need them,” broke in Nance.
“She only does it to make herself more haughty.”
“Anyway, Eloise raised the lorgnettes.”
“Poor Miss Higgins,” cried Molly.
“There