Betty Wales Senior.

by Margaret Warde.

INTRODUCTION

For the information of those readers who have not followed Betty Wales through the first three years of her college career, as described in "Betty Wales, Freshman," "Betty Wales, Soph.o.m.ore," and "Betty Wales, Junior," it should be explained that most of Betty's little circle began to be friends in their freshman year, when they lived off the campus at Mrs. Chapin's, and Mary Brooks, the only soph.o.m.ore in the house, ruled them with an autocratic hand. Betty found Helen Adams a comical and sometimes a trying roommate. Rachel Morrison and Katherine Kittredge were also at Mrs. Chapin's, and Roberta Lewis, who adored Mary Brooks and was desperately afraid of every one else in the house, though Betty Wales guessed that shyness was at the bottom of Roberta's haughty manner. Eleanor Watson was the most prominent member of the group that year and part of the next. Betty admired her greatly but found her a very difficult person to win as a friend, though in the end she proved worthy of all the trouble she had cost.

At the beginning of soph.o.m.ore year the Chapin House girls moved to the campus, and "the B's" and Madeline Ayres, who explained that she lived in "Bohemia, New York," joined the circle. In their junior year Betty and her friends organized the "Merry Hearts" society, and Georgia Ames, a freshman friend of Madeline's, amused and mystified the whole college until she was finally discovered to be merely one of Madeline's many delightful inventions. But the joke was on the "Merry Hearts" when a real Georgia Ames entered college. It was when they were juniors, too, that the "Merry Hearts" took a vacation trip to the Bahamas and incidentally manoeuvred a romance for two of their faculty friends--which caused Mary Brooks to rename their society the Merry Match-makers.

And now if any one wishes to know what Betty Wales and her friends did after they left college, well--there's something about it in "Betty Wales, B.A.," "Betty Wales & Co.," "Betty Wales on the Campus," and "Betty Wales Decides."

BETTY WALES, SENIOR

CHAPTER I

"BACK TO THE COLLEGE AGAIN"

"Oh, Rachel Morrison, am I too late for the four-ten train?"

Betty Wales, pink-cheeked and breathless, her yellow curls flying under her dainty lingerie hat, and her crisp white skirts held high to escape the dust of the station platform, sank down beside Rachel on a steamer trunk that the Harding baggage-men had been too busy or too accommodating to move away, and began to fan herself vigorously with a very small and filmy handkerchief.

"No, you're not late, dearie," laughed Rachel, pulling Betty's hat straight, "or rather the train is late, too. Where have you been?"

Betty smiled reminiscently. "Everywhere, pretty nearly. You know that cunning little freshman that had lost her trunks----"

"All those that I've interviewed have lost their trunks," interpolated Rachel.

Betty waved a deprecating hand toward the mountain of baggage that was piled up further down the platform.

"Oh, of course, in that lovely mess. Who wouldn't? But this girl lost hers before she got here--in Chicago or Albany, or maybe it was Omaha.

She lives in Los Angeles, so she might have lost them almost anywhere, you see."

"And of course she expected Prexy or the registrar to go back and look for them," added Rachel.

Betty laughed. "Not she. Besides she doesn't seem to care a bit. She seems to think it's a splendid chance to go to New York next week and buy new clothes. But what she wanted of me was to tell her where she could get some shirt waists--just enough to last until she's perfectly sure that the trunks are gone for good. I didn't want to stick around here from three to four, so I said I'd go and show her Evans's and that little new shirt waist place. Of course I pointed out all the objects of interest along the way, and when I mentioned Cuyler's, she insisted upon going in to have ices."

"And how many does that make for you to-day?" demanded Rachel severely.

"Well," Betty defended herself, "I treated you once, and you treated me once, and then we met Christy Mason, and as you couldn't go back with her I had to. But I only had lemonade that time. And this child was so comical, and it was such a good idea."

"What was such a good idea?" inquired Rachel.

"Oh, didn't I tell you? Why, after we'd finished at Cuyler's, she asked me if there weren't any other places something like it, and she said she thought if we tried them all in a row we could tell which was best. But we couldn't," sighed Betty regretfully, "because of course things taste better when you're hungriest. But anyhow she wanted to keep on, because now she can give pointers to other freshmen, and make them think she is a soph.o.m.ore."

"How about the shirt waists?"

"Oh, she had just got to that when I had to leave her." Betty rose, sighing, as a train whistled somewhere down the track. "Do you suppose Georgia Ames will be on this one?"

"Who can tell?" said Rachel. "There'll be somebody that we know anyway.

Wasn't that first day queer and creepy?"

"Yes," agreed Betty, "when n.o.body got off but freshmen frightened to pieces about their exams. And that was only two days ago! It seems two weeks. I've always rather envied the Students' Aid Society seniors, because they have such a good chance to pick out the interesting freshmen, but I shan't any more."

"Not even after to-day?"

Betty frowned reflectively. "Well, of course to-day has been pretty grand--with all those ices, and Christy, and the freshmen all so cheerful and amusing. And then there's the eight-fifteen. Won't it be fun--to see the Clan get off that? Yes, I think I do envy myself. Can a person envy herself, Rachel?" She gave Rachel's arm a sudden squeeze.

"Rachel," she went on very solemnly, "do you realize that we can't ever again in all our lives be Students' Aid Seniors, meeting poor little Harding freshmen?"

Rachel hugged Betty sympathetically. "Yes, I do," she said. "Why at this time next year I shall be earning my own living 'out in the wide, wide world,' as the song says, miles from any of the Clan."

Betty looked across the net-work of tracks, to the hills that make a circle about Harding. "And miles from this dear old town," she added.

"But we can write to each other, and make visits, and we can come back to cla.s.s reunions. But that won't be the same."

Rachel looked at the pretty, yellow-haired child, and wondered if she realized how different her "wide, wide world" was likely to be from Katherine's or Helen Chase Adams's--or Rachel Morrison's. To some of the Clan Harding meant everything they had ever known in the way of culture and scholarly refinement, of happy leisure and congenial friendship. It was comforting somehow to find that girls like Betty and the B's, who had everything else, were just as fond of Harding and were going to be just as sorry to leave it. Rachel never envied anybody, but she liked to think that this life that was so precious to her meant much to all her friends. It made one feel surer that pretty clothes and plenty of spending-money and delightful summers at the seash.o.r.e or in the mountains did not matter much, so long as the one big, beautiful fact of being a Harding girl was a.s.sured. All this flashed through Rachel's mind much more quickly than it can be written down. Aloud she said cheerfully, "Well, we have one whole year more of it."

"I should rather think so," declared Betty emphatically, "and we mustn't waste a single minute of it. I wish it was evening. It seems as if I couldn't wait to see the other girls."

"Well, there's plenty to do just now," said Rachel briskly, as the four-ten halted, and the streams of girls, laden with traveling bags, suit-cases, golf-clubs, tennis-rackets, and queer-shaped bulky parcels that had obviously refused to go into any trunk, began to descend from it.

Rachel hurried forward at once, eager to find someone who needed help or directions or a friendly word of welcome. But Betty stood where she was, just out of the crowd, watching the old girls' excited meetings and the new girls' timid progresses, which were sure to be intercepted before long by some white-gowned, competent senior, anxious to miss no possible opportunity for helpfulness.

Betty had done her part all day, and in addition had taken Rachel's place earlier in the afternoon, to give her a free hour for tutoring.

She was tired now and hot, and she had undoubtedly eaten too many ices; but she was also trying an experiment. Where she stood she could watch both platforms from which the girls were descending. Her quick glance shot from one to the other, scanning each figure as it emerged from the shadowy car and stopped for an instant, hesitating, on the platform. The train was nearly emptied of its Harding contingent when all at once Betty gave a little cry and darted forward to meet a girl who was making an unusually careful and prolonged inspection of the crowd below her.

She was a slender, pretty girl, with yellow hair, which curled around her face. She carried a trim little hand-bag and a well-filled bag of golf-clubs.

"Can I help you in any way?" asked Betty, holding out a hand for the golf-bag.

The pretty freshman turned a puzzled face toward her, and surrendered the bag. "I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I'm to be a freshman at Harding. Father telegraphed the registrar to meet me. Could you point her out, please?"

"I knew it," laughed Betty, gleefully. Then she turned to the girl. "The registrar is up at the college answering fifty questions a minute, and I'm here to meet you. Give me your checks, and we'll find an expressman.

Oh, yes, and where do you board?"

The pretty freshman answered her questions with an air of pleased bewilderment, and later, on the way up the hill, asked questions of her own, laughed shamefacedly over her misunderstanding about the registrar, was comforted when Betty had explained that it was not an original mistake, and invited her new friend to come and see her with that particular sort of eager shyness that is the greatest compliment one girl can pay to another.

"Dear old Dorothy," thought Betty, when she had deposited the freshman, considerably enlightened about college etiquette, at one of the pleasantest of the off-campus houses, and was speeding to the Belden for tea. "What a little goose she must have thought me! And what a dear she was! I wonder if this freshman will ever really care about me that way. I do mean to try to make her. Oh, what a lot of things seniors have to think about!"

But the only thing to think about that evening was the arrival of the eight-fifteen train, which would bring Eleanor, the B's, Nita Reese, Katherine Kittredge, Roberta Lewis, and Madeline Ayres, together with two-thirds of the rest of the senior cla.s.s back to Harding. It was such fun to saunter down to the station in the warm twilight, to wait, relieved of all responsibilities concerning cabs, expressmen, and belated trunks, while the crowded train pulled in, and then to dash frantically about from one dear friend to another, stopping to shake hands with a soph.o.m.ore here, and there to greet a junior, but being gladdest, of course, to welcome back the members of "the finest cla.s.s."

Betty and Rachel had arranged not to serve on the reception committee for freshmen that evening, and it was not long before the reunited "Merry Hearts" escaped from the pandemonium at the station to rea.s.semble on the Belden House piazza for what Katherine called a "high old talk."

How the tongues wagged! Eleanor Watson had come straight from her father's luxurious camp in the Colorado mountains, where she and Jim had been having a house-party for some of their Denver friends.

"You girls must all come out next summer," she declared enthusiastically. "Father sent a special invitation to you, Betty, and he and--and--mother"--Eleanor struggled with the new name for the judge's young wife--"are coming on to commencement, and then of course you'll all meet them. Mother is so jolly--she knows just what girls like, and she enters into all the fun, just like one of us. Of course she is absurdly young," laughed Eleanor, as if the stepmother's youth had never been her most intolerable failing in her daughter's eyes.

Babbie had been abroad, on an automobile trip through France. She looked more elegant than ever in a chic little suit from Paris, with a toque to match, and heavy gloves that she had bought in London.