Molly Brown's Freshman Days Part 19

"Really, you know," observed Jessie, "we should be called 'The Friends of the Wallflowers,' like some men at home, who made up their minds one New Year's night at a ball to give a poor cross-eyed, ugly girl who never had partners the time of her life, just once."

"Did they do it?" asked Nance, who imagined that she was a wallflower, and was always conscious when the name was mentioned.

"They certainly did," answered Jessie, "and when I saw the girl afterward in the dressing room, she said to me, 'Oh, Jessie, wasn't it heaven?' She cried a little. I was ashamed."

"By the way, Jessie, I never got my compliment," said Molly. "Pay it to me this instant, or I shall be thinking I haven't had a 'square deal.'"

"Well, here it is," answered Jessie. "It has been pa.s.sed along considerably, but it's all the more valuable for taking such a roundabout route to get to you. I'll warn you beforehand that you will probably have an electric shock when you hear it. You know I have some cousins who live up in New York. One of them writes to me----"

"Girl or man?" demanded Judy.

"Man," answered Jessie, blus.h.i.+ng.

There was a laugh at this, because Jessie's beaux were numerous.

"His best friend," she continued, "has a sister, and that sister--do you follow--is an intimate friend----"

"'An intimate friend of an intimate friend,'" one of the girls interrupted.

"Yes," said Jessie, "it's obscure, but perfectly logical. My cousin's intimate friend's sister has an intimate friend--Miss Green----"

"Oh, ho!" cried Judy. "Now we are getting down to rock bottom."

"And Miss Green told her intimate friend who told my cousin's intimate friend's sister--it's a little involved, but I think I have it straight--who told her brother who told my cousin who wrote it to me."

"But what did he write," they demanded in a chorus.

"That one of Miss Green's brothers was crushed on a charming red-headed girl from Kentucky."

Molly's face turned crimson.

"But Dodo is crushed on Judy," she laughed.

"It may be," said Jessie. "Rumors are most generally twisted."

The first meeting of the G. F.'s now disbanded and the members scattered to dress for the early Sunday dinner. They all attended Vespers that afternoon, and in the quiet hour of the impressive service more than one pondered seriously upon the conversation of the morning and the purpose of the new club.

CHAPTER XIII.

TRICKERY.

It was several days before the G. F.'s had an opportunity to practise any of their new resolutions on Frances Andrews. The eccentric girl was in the habit of skipping meals and eating at off hours at a little restaurant in the village, or taking ice cream sundaes in the drug store.

At last, however, she did appear at supper in a beautiful dinner dress of lavender crepe de chine with an immense bunch of violets pinned at her belt. She looked very handsome and the girls could not refrain from giving her covert glances of admiration as she took her seat stonily at the table.

It was the impetuous, precipitate Judy who took the lead in the promotion of kindliness and her premature act came near to cutting down the new club in its budding infancy.

"You must be going to a party," she began, flas.h.i.+ng one of her ingratiating smiles at Frances.

Frances looked at her with an icy stare.

"I--I mean," stammered Judy, "you are wearing such an exquisite dress.

It's too fine for ordinary occasions like this."

Frances rose.

"Mrs. Markham," she said to the matron of Queen's, "if I can't eat here without having my clothes sneered at, I shall be obliged to have my meals carried to my room hereafter."

Then she marched out of the dining room.

Mrs. Markham looked greatly embarra.s.sed and n.o.body spoke for some time.

"Good heavens!" said Judy at last in a low voice to Molly, "what's to be done now?"

"Why don't you write her a little note," replied Molly, "and tell her that you hadn't meant to hurt her feelings and had honestly admired her dress."

"Apologize!" exclaimed Judy, her proud spirit recoiling at the ign.o.ble thought. "I simply couldn't."

But since her attack on Molly, Judy had been very much ashamed of herself, and she was now taking what she called "self-control in broken doses," like the calomel treatment; that night she actually wrote a note to Frances and shoved it under the door. In answer to this abject missive she received one line, written with purple ink on highly scented heavy note paper:

"Dear Miss Kean," it ran, "I accept your apology.

"Yours sincerely, "FRANCES LE GRAND ANDREWS."

"Le Grand, that's a good name for her," laughed Judy, sniffing at the perfumed paper with some disgust.

But she wrote an elaborate report regarding the incident and read it aloud to the a.s.sembled G. F.'s at their second meeting.

In the meantime, Sallie Marks had her innings with the redoubtable Frances, and retreated, wearing the sad and martyred smile of one who is determined not to resent an insult. One by one the G.F.'s took occasion to be polite and kind to the scornful, suspicious Frances.

Her malicious speeches were ignored and her vulgarities--and she had many of them--pa.s.sed lightly over. Little by little she arrived at the conclusion that refinement did not mean priggishness and that vulgarity was not humor. Of course the change came very gradually. Not infrequently after a soph.o.m.ore snub, the whipped dog snarled savagely; or she would brazenly try to shock the supper table with a coa.r.s.e, slangy speech. But with the persistent friendliness of the Queen's girls, the fires in her nature began to die down and the intervals between flare-ups grew longer each day.

Frances Andrews was the first "subject" of the G.F.'s, and they were as interested in her regeneration as a group of learned doctors in the recovery of a dangerously ill patient.

In the meantime, the busy college life hummed on and Molly felt her head swimming sometimes with its variety and fullness. What with coaching Judy, blacking boots, making certain delicious sweetmeats called "cloudbursts,"--the recipe of which was her own secret,--which sold like hot cakes; keeping up the social end and the study end, Molly was beginning to feel tired. A wanness began to show in the dark shadows under her eyes and the pinched look about her lips even as early as the eventful evening when she posed for the senior living picture show.

"This child needs some make-up," the august senior president had exclaimed. "Where's the rouge and who's got my rabbit's foot? No, burned cork makes too broad a line. Give me one of the lighter colored eyebrow pencils. You mustn't lose your color, little girl," she said, dabbing a spot of red on each of Molly's pale cheeks. "Your roses are one of your chief attractions."

A great many students and some of the faculty had bought tickets for this notable occasion, and the gymnasium was well filled before the curtain was drawn back from a gigantic gold frame disclosing Mary Stewart as Joan of Arc in the picture by Bastien Le Page, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There was no attempt to reproduce the atmospheric visions of the angel and the knight in armor, only the poor peasant girl standing in the cabbage patch, her face transfigured with inspiration. When Molly saw Mary Stewart pose in this picture at the dress rehearsal, she could not help recalling the story of the bootblack father.

"She has a wonderful face, and I call it beautiful, if other people don't," she said to herself.

As for our little freshman, so dazed and heavy was she with fatigue, the night of the entertainment, that she never knew she had created a sensation, first as Botticelli's "Flora," barefooted and wearing a Greek dress constructed of cheesecloth, and then as "Mrs. Hamilton," in the blue crepe with a gauzy fichu around her neck.

After the exhibition, when all the actors were endeavoring to collect their belongings in the confusion of the green room, Sallie Marks came running behind the scenes.