Betty Wales Senior
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Margaret Warde >> Betty Wales Senior
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Betty looked puzzled. "Why, I haven't any, I'm afraid. I never get a
chance to make plans, because the things that turn up of themselves take
all my time. I'm just going to be at home with my family."
"Leave out the 'just,'" advised Miss Ferris. "So many of you seem to
feel as if you ought to apologize for staying at home."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that," said Betty soberly. "A lot of girls
in our class who don't need to a bit are going to teach, and Carlotta
Young said to me the other day that she thought we all ought to test our
education in some such way right off, so as to be sure it was really
worth something."
"And you are sure about yours without testing it?" asked Miss Ferris
quizzically.
Betty smiled at her happily. "I'm sure I've got something," she said.
"I'm afraid Carlotta wouldn't call it much of an education and I know I
ought to be ashamed that it isn't more, but I'm awfully glad I've got
it."
"I'm glad you have, too," said Miss Ferris so earnestly that Betty
wondered what she meant. But she didn't get a chance to ask, for
somebody knocked just then and the two girls said good-bye and hurried
off to dress for their respective class suppers.
19--'s was held in the big hall of the Students' Building. The junior
ushers had trimmed it with red and green bunting, and great bowls of red
roses transformed the huge T-shaped table into a giant flower-bed.
"I hope they haven't more than emptied the treasury for those flowers,"
said Babe anxiously, when she saw them.
"Hardly," Babbie reassured her. "Judge Watson sent the whole lot, so you
needn't worry about your treasury. He consulted me about the color.
Isn't he a dear?"
"Yes, he is," said Bob, "and he evidently thinks his only daughter is
another. Where's the supper-chart?"
"Out in the hall," explained Babbie, "with the whole class fighting for
a chance at it. But I know where we sit. Betty thought we'd better keep
things lively down at the end of the T."
"Well, I guess, we can do that," said Babe easily. "Where is Betty,
anyway?"
"Here," answered Betty, hurrying up. "And girls, please don't say
anything about it, but non-graduates don't generally come to the suppers
and the seating committee forgot about T. Reed, so she hasn't any
place."
"The idea!" cried Bob indignantly. "But she can have Eleanor's seat."
Betty hesitated. "No, because they changed the chart after they heard
about Christy's not coming. But Cora Thorne is sick, so I'm going to let
T. have my seat, right among you girls that she used to know----"
"You're not going to do anything of the kind," declared Babbie hotly.
"Shove everybody along one place, or else put in a seat for T."
"The chairs are too close together now and Cora's place is way around at
the other end. It would make too much confusion to move so many people.
Here comes T. now. I shall be almost opposite Eleanor and Katherine, and
I don't mind one bit."
So it happened that Betty Wales ate her class supper between Clara
Madison and the fat Miss Austin, and enjoyed it as thoroughly as if she
had been where she belonged, between Babbie and Roberta. The supper
wasn't very good--suppers for two hundred and fifty people seldom
are--but the talk and the jokes, the toasts and the histories, Eleanor's
radiant face at the head of the table, the spirit of jollity and
good-fellowship everywhere,--these were good enough to make up. Besides,
it was the last time they would all be together. Betty hadn't realized
before how much she cared for them all--for the big indiscriminate mass
of the class that she had worked and played with these four years. She
had expected to miss her best friends, but now, as she looked down the
long tables, she saw so many others that she should miss. Yes, she
should miss them all from the fat Miss Austin who was so delighted to be
sitting beside her to the serious-minded Carlotta Young, with her
theories about testing your education.
Katherine was reading the freshman history, hitting off the reception,
with its bewildering gaiety and its terrifying grind-book, those first
horrible midyears, made even more frightful by Mary Brooks's rumor, the
basket-ball game--when that was mentioned they made T. Reed stand on her
chair to be cheered, and then they cheered the rest of the team, who, as
Katherine said, "had marched so gallantly to a glorious defeat." As
Christy wasn't there, somebody read her letter, which explained that her
mother was better but that the twins had come down with the measles and
Christy was "standing by the ship." So they cheered the plucky letter
and then they sang to its author.
"Oh, here's to our Christine,
We love her though unseen,
Drink her down, drink her down,
Drink her down, down, down!"
When the team was finally allowed to sit down, Katherine went on to the
joys of spring-term, with its golf and tennis, its Mary-bird club and
its tumultuous packing and partings. When she had finished and been
applauded and sung to, and finally allowed to sit down and eat a very
cold croquette, Betty looked over at Emily Davis and the next minute
for no reason at all she found herself winking back the tears. She had
had such a good time that year and K. had picked out just the comical
little things that made you remember the others that she hadn't
mentioned.
Little Alice Waite was toasting the cast. Alice was no orator. She
stammered and hesitated and made you think she was going to break down,
but she always ended by saying or doing something that brought down the
house.
"I think you ought to have given this toast to somebody else," she began
innocently. "I can't act, and I can't speak either, as it happens.
Besides words speak louder than actions. No, I mean actions speak louder
than words, so I will let the cast toast themselves."
"Roast themselves, you mean," said Katherine, pushing back her chair.
And then began a clever burlesque of the casket scene in which Gratiano
played Portia's part, Shylock was Nerissa, Gobbo Bassanio, and Jessica
the Prince of Morocco. Next Alice called for the Gobbos and Portia and
the Prince of Morocco "stood forth" and went through a solemn travesty
of the scene between the father and son that left the class faint and
speechless with laughter.
Then there were more toasts and when the coffee had been served they
made the engaged girls run around the table. Betty was sorry then that
she wasn't in her own place, to help get Babbie Hildreth started. Her
friends were all sure that she was engaged and she had hinted that she
might tell them more about it at class-supper, but now she denied it as
stoutly as ever. Finally Bob settled the question by getting up and
running in her place,--a non-committal proceeding that delighted
everybody.
After that came the last toast, "Our esprit de corps." Kate Denise had
it, for no reason that Betty could see unless Christy had wanted to show
Kate that the class understood the difference between her and the other
Hill girls. And then Kate was one of 19--'s best speakers and so could
do justice to the subject.
"I think we ought to drink this toast standing," she began. "We've drunk
to the cast and the team, to our presidents, our engaged girls, our
faculty. Now I ask you to drink to the very greatest pride and honor of
this class,--to the way we've always stood together, to the way we stand
together to-night, to the way we shall stand together in the future, no
matter where we go or what we do. It's not every class that can put this
toast on its supper-card. Not every class knows what it means to be run,
not in the interest of a clique or by a few leading spirits, but by the
good-feeling of the whole big class. And so I ask you to drink one more
toast--to the girl who started this feeling of good-fellowship at a
certain class-meeting that some of us remember, and who has kept it up
by being a friend to everybody and making us all want to be friends.
Here's to Betty Wales."
When Betty heard her name she almost jumped out of her chair with
amazement. She had been listening admiringly to Kate's eloquent little
speech, never dreaming how it would end and now they were all clapping
and pushing back their chairs again, and Clara Madison was trying to
make her stand up in hers.
"Speech!" shouted the irrepressible Bob and the girls sat down again and
the big table grew still, while Betty twisted her napkin into a knot and
smiled bravely into all the welcoming faces.
"I'm sure Kate is mistaken," she said at last in a shaky little voice.
"I'm sure every girl in 19-- wanted every other girl to have her share
of the fun just as much as I did. The class cup, that we won at tennis
in our sophomore year is on the table somewhere. Let's fill it with
lemonade and sing to everybody right down the line. And while they're
filling the cup let's sing to Harding College."
It took a long time to sing to everybody, but not a minute too long.
Betty watched the faces of the girls when their turns came--the girls
who were always sung to, like Emily Davis, and the girls who had never
been sung to in all the four years and who flushed with pride and
pleasure to hear their names ring out and to feel that they too belonged
to the finest, dearest class that ever left Harding.
"Now we must have the regular stunts," said Eleanor. There was a
shuffling of chairs and she and Betty and the people who had had toasts
slipped back to their own particular crowds, leaving the top of the
table for the stunt-doers. It was shockingly late, but they wanted all
the old favorites. Who knew when Emily Davis would be back to do her
temperance lecture or how long it would be before they could hear Madame
Patti sing "Home, Sweet Home" through a wheezy gramophone?
"Was it all right?" Eleanor whispered to Betty as they hunted up their
wraps a little later.
"Perfectly splendid," said Betty with shining eyes. "The loveliest
end-up to the loveliest commencement that ever was."
"We haven't got to say good-bye yet," said somebody. "There's a class
meeting to-morrow at nine, you know."
"Half of us will probably sleep over," said Babe in a queer,
supercilious tone. Not for all the morning naps in the world would Babe
have missed that good-bye meeting.
CHAPTER XIX
"GOOD-BYE!"
"And after commencement packing," said Madeline Ayres sadly, "and that's
no joke either, I can tell you."
"Oh, I don't know," said Babe airily. "Give away everything that you
can't sell, and you won't be troubled. That's what I've done."
"I couldn't give up my dear old desk," said Rachel soberly, "nor my
books and pictures."
"Oh, I've kept a few little things myself," explained Babe hastily,
"just to remember the place by."
"My mother wanted to stay and help me," laughed Nita. "She thought if we
both worked hard we might get through in a day."
"Mary Brooks did hers in two hours," announced Katherine, "and I guess
I'm as bright as little Mary about most things, so I'm not worrying."
"Isn't it time to start for class-meeting?" asked Betty, coming out on
the piazza with Roberta.
"See them walk off together arm in arm," chuckled Bob softly, "just as
if they knew they were going to be elected our alumnae president and
secretary respectfully."
"Don't you mean respectively, Bob?" asked Helen Adams.
"Of course I do," retorted Bob, "but I'm not obliged to say what I mean
now. I'm an alum. I can use as bad diction as I please and the long arm
of the English department can't reach out and spatter my mistakes with
red ink."
The election of officers didn't take long. It had all been cut and dried
the night before, and the nominating committee named Betty for president
and Shylock for secretary without even going through the formality of
retiring to deliberate. Then Katherine moved that the surplus in the
treasury be turned over to "our pet philanthropy, the Students' Aid,"
and Carlotta Young inquired anxiously whether the first reunion was to
be in one or two years.
"In one," shouted the assembly to a woman, and the meeting adjourned
tumultuously. But nobody went home, in spite of the packing that
clamored for attention.
"Good-bye, you dear old thing!"
"See you next June for sure. I'm coming back then, if I do live away out
in Seattle."
"You're going to study art in New York, you say? Oh, I'm there very
often. Here, let me copy that address."
"Going abroad for the summer, you lucky girl? Well, rather not! I'm
going to tutor six young wigglers into a prep. school."
"Wasn't last night fun? Don't you wish we could have it all over
again,--except the midyears and the papers for English novelists."
"Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!"
But these weren't the good-byes that came hardest; those would be said
later in the dear, dismantled rooms or at the station, for very close
friends would arrange to meet again there. But the close friendships
would be kept up in letters and visits, whereas these casual
acquaintances might never again be renewed.
"I've seen you nearly every day for three years," Madeline Ayres told
little Miss Avery, whose name came next to hers on the class-list, "and
now you're going to live in Iowa and I'm going to Italy. The world is a
big place, isn't it?"
But Nita Reese thought it was surprisingly small when she found that
Emily Davis was going to teach French in the little town where she
lived, and Betty got a great deal of comfort from the fact that four
other 19-- girls lived in Cleveland.
"Though I can't believe it's really over," Betty confided to Bob. "I
don't feel a bit like an alum."
"That's because you still look just like a freshman," returned Bob,
unfeelingly. "I'll bet you a trolley-ride to any place you choose that
you'll be taken for one before you leave Harding."
Sure enough Betty, hurrying across the campus a moment later to
intercept the man who had promised to crate her desk and then never come
for it, was stopped by a timid little sub-freshman with her hair in a
braid, who inquired if she was going to take the "major French"
examination, and did she know whether it came at eleven or twelve
o'clock?
"So we're all got to go off on a trolley-ride," shouted Bob jubilantly,
and though Betty protested and called Helen to witness that she hadn't
promised Bob any trolley-ride whatever, everybody agreed that they ought
to have one last picnic somewhere before they separated. So they all
hurried home to do what Katherine called "tall strides of work," and at
four o'clock they were waiting, with tempting-looking bags and bundles
tucked under their arms, for a car.
"We'll take the first one that comes," Bob decided, "and go until we see
a nice picnic-y place."
Generally no one place would have pleased everybody, but to-day no one
said a word against Bob's first choice,--a steep, breezy hillside, with
a great thicket of mountain laurel in full bloom near the summit and a
flat rock, shaded by a giant elm-tree, for a table.
[Illustration: "LADIES, BEHOLD THE PRECEPTRESS OF THE KANKAKEE ACADEMY"]
It was such a comical supper, for each girl had obeyed Bob's haphazard
instructions to bring what she liked best. So Roberta had nothing but
ginger-snaps and Babbie solemnly presented each guest with a bottle of
olives. Madeline had brought strawberries with sugar to dip them in, and
Helen, Betty and Eleanor discovered to their amazement that they had all
chosen chocolate eclairs.
"It's not a very substantial supper," said Madeliner "but we can stop
at Cuyler's on our way back."
"For a substantial ice," jeered Bob.
"Who's hungry anyway after last night?" asked Nita.
"I am," declared Eleanor. "They took away my salad before I was through
with it, and K. stole my ice."
"Well, you're growing fat," Katherine defended herself, "and you've got
to save your lovely slenderness until after Mary's wedding. She'll tell
everybody that you're the college beauty and you must live up to the
reputation or we shall be undone."
Katherine knew that she couldn't come on from Kankakee for that wedding,
and Helen and Rachel knew that they couldn't either, though they lived
nearer. And Madeline was sailing on Saturday for Italy, "to stay until
daddy's paint-box runs out of Italian colors." But they didn't talk
about those things at the picnic, nor on the swift ride home across the
dark meadows, nor even at Cuyler's, which looked empty and deserted when
they tramped noisily in and ordered their ices.
"Everybody else is too busy to go on picnics," said Bob.
"We always did know how to have the best kind of times," declared Babbie
proudly.
"Of course. Aren't we 'Merry Hearts'?" queried Babe. "Being nice to
freaks was only half of being a 'Merry Heart.'"
"_Why_, girls," cried Nita excitedly, "as long as we didn't give away
the 'Merry Hearts,' we can go on being them, can't we?"
"We couldn't stop if we tried," said Madeline. "Remember, girls, two is
a 'Merry Hearts' quorum. Whenever two of us get together they can have a
meeting."
They said good-night with the emphasis strongly on the last syllable,
and went at the neglected packing in earnest. Betty's train didn't go
until nearly ten the next morning, but Helen left at nine and Madeline
and Roberta ten minutes later, so there wouldn't be much time for
anything but the good-byes, that, do what you might, could not be put
off any longer.
But after all they were gay good-byes. Helen Adams, to be sure, almost
broke down When she kissed Betty and whispered, "Good-bye and thank you
for everything." But the next minute they were both laughing at K.'s
ridiculous old telescope bag.
"It's a long rest and a good meal of oats the poor beastie shall have at
the end of this trip," said Katherine. "Ladies, behold the preceptress
of the Kankakee Academy. Father telegraphed me yesterday that I've got
the place, and I hereby solemnly promise to buy a respectable suit-case
out of my first month's salary."
"Oh, you haven't any of you gone yet, have you?" asked Babbie Hildreth,
hurrying up with Eleanor and Madeline. "You see Babe kept more things
than she thought and it was too late to send for another packing-box,
so she put them into a suit-case and a kit bag and a hat-box. And the
carriage didn't come for us, so she tried to carry them all from the
car, and of course she got stuck in the turn-stile. The girls are
getting her out as fast as they can. They sent us on ahead to find you."
Just as Helen's train pulled in Bob appeared with the rest of the "Merry
Hearts" as escort and a small boy to help with her luggage; and they had
a minute all together.
"Well," said Madeline lightly, "we're starting out into the wide, wide
world at last. I'll say it because I'm used to starting _off_ to queer
places and I rather like it."
"Here's hoping it's a jolly world for every one of us," said Rachel.
"Here's to our next meeting," added Katherine.
"Girls," said Betty solemnly, "I feel it in my bones that we are going
to be together again some time. I don't mean just for a 19-- reunion,
but for a good long time."
"With me teaching in Boston," laughed Rachel.
"And me teaching in Kankakee," put in Katherine proudly.
"And Madeline in Italy, and the rest of you anywhere between New York
and Denver," finished Rachel. "It doesn't look very probable."
"It's going to happen though,--I'm sure of it," persisted Betty gaily.
"Oh, I do just hope so," said little Helen Adams, stepping on board her
train.
"They say that what you want hard enough you'll get," said Madeline
philosophically. "Come on, Shylock. Don't any of you forget to send me
steamer letters."
"Wait! we're going on that train too," cried Babe, clutching her
parcels.
"Babe can't make connections if we wait," explained Babbie.
"And she'd get lonely going so far without us," added Bob.
The four who were left stood where they could wave by turns at the two
trains until both were out of sight.
Then Betty caught her three oldest friends into a big, comprehensive
hug. "After all," she said, "whether we ever get together or not, we've
had this--four whole years of it, to remember all our lives. Now let's
go and get one more strawberry ice before train-time."
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The Books in this Series are:
BETTY WALES, FRESHMAN
BETTY WALES, SOPHOMORE
BETTY WALES, JUNIOR
BETTY WALES, SENIOR
BETTY WALES, B.A.
BETTY WALES & CO.
BETTY WALES ON THE CAMPUS
BETTY WALES DECIDES
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