This novel is the third in a series of eight books written about Miss Molly Brown of Kentucky during her education at Wellington College in the early years of the 1900's.
By : Nell Speed (1878 - 1913)
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No. 5 in the Quadrangle at Wellington College was in a condition of upheaval. Surprising things were happening there. The simultaneous arrival of six trunks, five express boxes and a piano had thrown the three orderly and not over-large rooms into a state of the wildest confusion.
In the midst of this mountain of luggage and scattered boxes stood a small, lonely figure dressed in brown, gazing disconsolately about.
“I feel as if I had been cast up by an earthquake with a lot of other miscellaneous things,” she remarked hopelessly.
It was Nance Oldham, back at college by an early train, and devoutly wishing she had waited for the four-ten when the others were expected.
“This is too much to face alone,” she continued. “If it had been at Queen’s it never would have happened. Mrs. Markham wouldn’t have allowed six trunks and a piano and five boxes to be piled into one room. And mine at the very bottom, too. If it wasn’t a selfish act, I think I’d leave everything and go call on Mrs. McLean—but, no, that wouldn’t do on the first day.” Nance blushed. “But Andy’s there to-day.” She blushed again at this bold, outspoken thought. “I shall get the janitor to come up here and distribute these things,” she added presently, with New England determination not even to peep at a picture of pleasure behind a granite wall of duty.
The doors of No. 5 opened on a broad, high-ceiled corridor, the side walls of which were wainscoted halfway up with dark polished wood. On either side of this corridor ranged the apartments and single rooms of the Quadrangle, one row facing the campus, the other the courtyard. An occasional upholstered bench or high-backed chair stood between the frequent doors and gave a home-like touch to the long gallery. They had been the gift of a rich ex-graduate.
Nance, closing the door of No. 5, paused and looked proudly down the polished vista of the hallway, which curved at the far end and continued its way on the other side of the Quadrangle.
The sound of voices and laughter floated to her through the half open doors of the other rooms. With a smile of contentment, she sat down in one of the high-backed chairs.
“Dear old Wellington,” she said softly, “other girls love their homes, but I love you.” Thus she apostrophized the classic shades of the university while her gaze lighted absently on a large laundry bag stuffed full standing just outside one of the doors. It was different from the usual Wellington laundry bag, being of a peculiar shape and of material covered with Japanese fans.
“It’s Otoyo’s. Of course, she must have been here since Monday. I heard she had spent the summer down in the village.”
She hastened along the green path of carpet running down the middle of the corridor and paused at the room of the Japanese laundry bag.
“Otoyo Sen,” she called. “Why don’t you come out and meet your friends?”
The Japanese girl was seated on the floor gazing at a photograph. She rose quickly and flew to the door, thrusting the picture behind her.
“Oh, I am so deeply happee to see you again, Mees Oldham,” she exclaimed.
“She has learned the use of adverbs,” thought Nance, kissing Otoyo’s round dark cheek.
“You see I have been studying long time. I now speak the language with correctness. Do you not think so?” said Otoyo, apparently reading Nance’s thoughts.
“Perfectly,” answered Nance. “But tell me the news. Is Queen’s not to be rebuilt?”
“No, no. Queen’s is to remain flat on the ground. She will not be erected into another building.”
“And have you had a happy summer? Was it quite lonesome for you, poor child?”
“No, no,” protested Otoyo, still hiding the photograph behind her. “Those who remained at Wellington were most kind to little Japanese girl.”
“And who remained, Otoyo?”
“Professor Green was here long time. I studied the English language under him. He is a great man. It is an honorable pleasure to learn from one so great.”
“He is, indeed. And who else? Any of the rest of the faculty?”
“No, no. They had all departing gone.”
Nance smiled. There was still a relic of last year’s English.
“Mrs. McLean and her family remained at Wellington through the entire summer,” went on Otoyo fluently.
“And were they nice to you, Otoyo?”
“Veree, exceedinglee.”
“Was Andy well?”
“Quite, quite,” replied the Japanese girl, backing off from Nance and slipping the photograph into a book.
Not for many a day did Nance find out that it was a portrait of that youth himself, taken at the age of eight in Scotch kilties and a little black velvet hat with two streamers down the back.
Suddenly Otoyo became very voluble. She changed the subject and talked in rapid, smooth English. Could she not see the new rooms of her friends? She understood everybody was coming down on the four-ten train. It would be very crowded. She had found a new laundress whom she could highly recommend.
Nance looked at her curiously as they strolled back to the other rooms. Something was changed about the little Japanese girl. She seemed older and much less timid.
It was Miss Sen who found the man to move the trunks, and who helped Nance unpack her things and lay them in half the chest of drawers; and it was Otoyo, also, who, with the skill of an artisan, removed all the nails from the express box tops so that they might be unpacked immediately by their owners. At lunch time she led Nance into the great dining hall of the Quadrangle where more than a hundred girls ate their meals three times a day. There was no attention she did not show to Nance, and all because her conscience was heavy within her on account of the one dishonorable act of her life. How could she know that among the scores of photographs taken of young Andy from his babyhood to his present age, Mrs. McLean would never miss one small, faded picture out of the pile thrust into a cabinet drawer?
At last it came time to meet the four-ten, and Nance, looking spic and span in fresh white duck and white shoes and stockings, was rather surprised to find Otoyo also attired in a pretty white dress, her face shaded with a Leghorn hat trimmed with pink roses.
“Why, Miss Sen,” she exclaimed, “how did you learn so soon to dress yourself in this charming American style?”
“At a garden party at Mrs. McLean’s I learned a very many things,” said Otoyo, “and by the purchasing agent I have obtained dresses of summer, of duckling, lining and musling; also this hat and two others very pretty.”
Nance laughed.
“You mean duck, linen and muslin, child,” she said.
When the four-ten train to Wellington pulled into the station it seemed as if every student in the university must be crowded inside. They leaned from the windows and packed the doorways, overflowing onto the platforms.
The air vibrated with high feminine shrieks of joy. Only the poor little freshies were silent in all this jubilation of reunions. Suddenly Nance, spying Molly Brown and Judy Kean, rushed to meet them, Otoyo following at her heels like a toy spaniel after a larger dog. There was a long triangular embrace.
“Well, here we are, and juniors,” was Judy’s first comment. “Nance, you’re looking fine as silk. No sign of travel on that snowy gown.”
“There oughtn’t to be,” said Nance. “I just put it on half an hour ago.”
“And look at our little Jap,” cried Molly, hugging Otoyo. “Look at little Miss Sen, all dressed up in a beautiful linen.”
“Little Miss Sen has been learning a thing or two,” said Nance. “She’s been to parties, she’s been studying English under a famous professor; she’s been buying duckling, lining and musling dresses through a purchasing agent with very good taste, and she’s got a photograph she looks at in private and hides away when any one comes into the room. Oh, you needn’t think I didn’t see you!”
Otoyo blushed scarlet and hung her head.
“Oh, thou crafty one,” Judy was saying, when four of the old Queen’s girls pounced on them with suit cases and satchels. “Why, here are the Gemini,” Judy continued, embracing the Williams sisters. “Burned to a mahogany brown, too. Where did you get that tan? You look like a pair of—hum—Filipinos.”
“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.
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