Chapter 3 PARADES AND PARTIES

It was surprising how well the girl from Bohemia fitted into the life at Harding. She had never experienced an examination or even a formal recitation until the beginning of her freshman term. She had seldom lived three months in any one place, and she had grown up absolutely without reference to the rules and regulations and conventions that meant so much to the majority of her fellow-students. But she did not find the recitations frightful, nor the simple routine of life irksome.

She was willing to tell everybody who cared to listen what she had seen of French pensions, Italian beggars, or Spanish bullfights. It astonished her to find that her experiences were unique, because she had always accepted them as comparatively commonplace; but her pity for the girls who had never been east of Cape Cod nor west of Harding,-there were two of them at the Belden,-was quite untinged with self-congratulation.

She was very much amused and not a little pleased, by her election to the post of class secretary.

"They did it because I passed up four languages," she explained to Betty. "Somehow it got around-I'm sure I never meant to boast of it-and they seemed to think they ought to show their appreciation. Nice of them, wasn't it? But I fancy I shan't have a large international correspondence. It would have been more to the point if they'd found out whether I can write plainly." And the girl from Bohemia chuckled softly.

"What's the joke?" inquired Betty.

"Nothing," answered Madeline, "only I can't. Miss Felton made me spell off every word of my Spanish examination paper, because she couldn't read it, and I can't read my last theme myself," and she laughed again merrily.

"Let's see it," demanded Betty, reaching for the paper at the top of the pile on Madeline's desk.

"That's next week's," said Madeline. "I thought I'd do them both while I was at it. But this week's is funnier."

"This week's" proved to be an absurd incident founded upon the illegibility of Henry Ward Beecher's handwriting. It was cleverly told, but the cream of its humor lay in the fact that Madeline's writing, if not so bad as Mr. Beecher's, was certainly bad enough.

"Maybe Miss Raymond can make out what he really wrote, but I've forgotten now, and I can't," said Madeline, tossing the theme back on the pile. "And I didn't try to write badly either. It just happened."

Everything "just happened" with Madeline Ayres. Betty had said that things fell into place for her, and people seemed to have a good deal the same pleasant tendency. But if they did not, Madeline seldom exerted herself to make them do her bidding. She admired hard work, and did a good deal of it by fits and starts. But she detested wire-pulling, and took an instant dislike to Eleanor Watson because some injudicious person told her that Eleanor had said she was sure to be popular and prominent at Harding.

"What nonsense!" she said, with a flash of scorn in her slumberous hazel eyes. "How it spoils life to count up the chances like that! How it takes the fun out of everything! The right way is to go ahead and enjoy yourself, and work your prettiest, and take things when they come. They always come-if you give them a little time," she added with a return of her usual serenity.

So it was wholly a matter of chance that Madeline Ayres should have succeeded in turning Helen Chase Adams into an athlete. Helen had come to college with several very definite theories about life, most of which had been shattered at the start. She had promptly revised her idea of a college in conformity with what she found-and loved-at Harding. She had decided, with some reluctance, that she had been mistaken in supposing that all pretty girls were stupid. But she still believed that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains-laying no very stringent emphasis on the "infinite"; and she was determined to prove the truth of that bold, if somewhat elusive, assertion, at least to the extent of showing that she, Helen Chase Adams, could make a thoroughgoing success of her college course.

Success may mean anything. To Helen Adams it had meant, ever since the day of the sophomore-freshman basket-ball game, the ability to write something that would interest her classmates. It might be a song that they would care to sing, or a little verse or a story that Miss Raymond would read in her theme class, as she had Mary Brooks's version of the Chapin house freshmen's letters home, and that the girls would listen to and laugh over, and later discuss and compliment her upon. It was not that she wanted the compliments, but they would measure her success.

Helen admired the girl from Bohemia because she could write-Betty had told her about the Henry Ward Beecher theme,-also because she was quick and keen, seldom hurried or worried out of her habitual serenity, and finally because Betty admired her. Madeline Ayres, for her part, thought of Helen chiefly as Betty's roommate, noticed the awkward little forward tilt of her head just as she had noticed the inharmonious arrangement of Betty's green vase, and commented upon the one in exactly the same spirit that she had called attention to the other.

"You ought to go in for gym," she said one afternoon when she had strolled into Betty's room and found only Helen. "It would straighten you up, and make you look like a different person. I'm going in for it myself, hard. I'm hoping that it will cure my slouchy walk, and turn me out 'a marvel of grace and beauty,' as the physical culture advertisements always say. Let's be in the same class, so that we can practice things together at home."

"But I should take sophomore gym and you'd be with the freshmen," objected Helen.

"Why don't you take freshman gym too? You can't do the exercises any too well, can you?"

"No," admitted Helen, frankly. "I cut a lot last year, and I couldn't do them anyway."

"Don't you hate to struggle along when you're not ready to go?" asked the girl from Bohemia.

Helen agreed that she did, and a moment later they were comparing schedules and deciding upon a class which they could both join. It came directly in the middle of the afternoon, and Helen Adams had always considered gym at any hour a flagrant waste of time; but she did not say so. There had been something in Madeline's outspoken reference to her awkward carriage that, without hurting her, had struck home. Helen Chase Adams aspired to literary honors at Harding; to this desire was suddenly added a violent ambition to be what Madeline had termed "a marvel of grace."

Betty was amazed, when she came in a little later, to find Helen trying on her gym suit.

"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded. "Gym doesn't begin for two weeks yet."

"I know it," said Helen, "but the neck of my suit never was right. It's awfully unbecoming. How would you fix it?"

"You frivolous thing!" laughed Betty, squinting at the unbecoming neck for a moment. "It's too high behind, that's all. Rip off the collar and I'll cut it down. And I have an extra blue tie that you can have-it needs a tie. But I thought you'd manage to get an excuse from gym, when you hate it so."

"Perhaps I shan't hate it this year," ventured Helen, and neither then nor later did Betty exactly understand her roommate's sudden devotion to parallel bars, ropes, the running track, and breathing exercises. But in time she did thoroughly appreciate the results of this physical training. Helen Chase Adams was never exactly "a marvel of grace"; but she was erect and supple, with considerable poise and dignity of bearing, when she left Harding.

Another thing that Madeline Ayres "happened upon" was the Republican parade. Presidential elections had been celebrated in various ways at Harding. There had been banners spread to the breeze, songs and bells in the night-watches, mock caucuses and conventions, campaign speeches, and Australian balloting, before election time. But the parade was of Madeline's invention.

It was about eight o'clock on the evening after election day that she appeared in Mary Brooks's door-she had made friends with Mary almost as easily as Betty had.

"I say," she said, dropping off her rain-coat and displaying a suit of manly black beneath, to match the short brown wig above. "Let's have a Republican parade. Who'll be the defeated candidate, in chains?"

Then she smiled broadly, displaying rows of even white teeth, and Mary grasped the situation in a moment.

"I'm with you, Roosevelt," she said. "Nita Reese can be the defeated one.

I'll go and get her."

"And you be leader of the band," said Madeline. "You get combs and I'll get tin pans."

"Let's take up a collection and have ice-cream later," proposed Mary.

"All right. I'll tell Betty to see to that. I've got to lead a strenuous life finding clothes for Fairbanks," and "President Roosevelt" disappeared down the hall.

Promptly at nine the parade assembled on the third floor corridor. The president elect was drawn in an express wagon, except down the stairs between floors. Out of consideration for the weight of his chains the defeated candidate was allowed to ride in a barouche, alias a rocking- chair. But he objected to riding backward, and the barouche would not move the other way round, so he accepted the arm of the leader of the band and walked, chains and all. The vice-president walked from the start. At intervals of five minutes one or both of the successful candidates made speeches. The defeated candidate wished to do likewise, but the other two drowned him out. Between times the band, composed of all the Belden House who could play on combs or who could find tin pans, discoursed sweet music. Those who could not do either formed what Mary Brooks called "a female delegation of the G.O.P. from Colorado," and closed in the rear of the procession in a most imposing manner.

The vice-president elect wanted to make a tour of the campus houses, but the twenty minutes to ten bell rang, and there was only time to eat the ice cream.

The fact that Roberta Lewis, who happened to be in Mary's room when the president made his first call, laughed herself into hysterics over the parade, proves that it was funny. The further fact that she had firmly decided to leave college at Christmas time, but changed her mind after she had seen the parade, shows that even "impromptu stunts" are not always as silly and futile as they seem.

But before the Republican parade came Hallowe'en, and Hallowe'en on the campus is not a thing to pass over lightly. Each house has some sort of party, generally in costume. There is a good deal of rivalry, and as every house wishes to see and judge of the achievements of its neighbors, the most interesting encounters are likely to take place midway between houses, on the journeys from one party to another.

In Betty's sophomore year the Belden had a masquerade ball, under the direction of Mary Brooks and the girl from Bohemia. The Hilton House indulged in an old-fashioned country Hallowe'en, with a spelling match, dancing to "Roger de Coverley" and "Money Musk," apple-bobbing and all the other traditional methods of finding out about your lover on All Saints' Eve. The Westcott gave a "spook" party, one of the other houses a play, still another a goblin dance, to which everybody carried jack-o'- lanterns, and the rest celebrated the holiday in other characteristic and amusing ways. The campus resembled a cross between the midway at a World's Fair and the grand finale of a comic opera; for ghosts consorted there with ballet dancers and Egyptian princesses, spooks and goblins linked arms with pirates in top-boots and rosy farmers' daughters in calico, and nuns and Puritan maidens chatted familiarly with villainous and fascinating gentlemen, who twirled black mustaches and threatened to kiss them.

By nine o'clock everybody had seen everybody else, and congratulations for successful costumes, clever acting, and thrilling ghost stories were nearly all distributed. Toward the end of the evening there were a good many small gatherings, met to talk over the fun in detail and enjoy the numerous "spreads" that had been sent on from home,-for the college girl's family becomes almost as expert in detecting a festival afar off as is the girl herself.

Nan never let the Wales household forget its duty in such matters, and a merry party was assembled in Betty's room to eat the salad, sandwiches, jelly, olives, cake, candy, nuts, and fruit that her mother had provided.

"How time flies," observed Mary Brooks sagely, helping herself to another sandwich. "I suppose you gay young sophomores don't realize it, but it's almost Christmas time."

"And after Christmas, midyears," wailed a freshman from her corner.

"And after midyears what?

"'To be or not to be, that is the question,'" quoted Katherine

Kittredge loudly.

"But for sophomores who survive the midyears," went on Mary, "the next thing of importance is the society elections."

"That's so," said Betty eagerly. "We can get into your wonderful societies after midyears, if we're brainy enough. I'd forgotten all about them."

"Then I'll wager you're about the only sophomore who hasn't thought of them occasionally this fall," announced Mary. "And now I'm ready for some candy."

"Tell us how to go to work to get into those societies, can't you?" asked

Bob from her place beside the salad bowl.

"Work hard and write themes," said Mary briefly, and the subject was dropped.

Betty thought no more about Mary's remark then, but when she and Helen were alone it came back to her.

"I suppose some girls do think about the societies a lot, and plan and hope to get in," she said.

"I suppose so," returned Helen. "I shan't have to. I am perfectly safe to stay out."

"Oh, so am I, as far as that goes," said Betty carelessly.

Helen, watching her closely, wondered how any popular girl could be as unconscious as Betty seemed. She had overheard a Belden House senior telling Mary Brooks that Betty Wales was sure to go into a society the minute she became eligible. Helen opened her mouth to convey this information to Betty, but stopped just in time.

"For she's not unhappy about it," thought Helen, "and it would be dreadful if they should be mistaken. But they can't be," concluded Helen loyally, watching Betty's face as she read a note that her mother had tucked in among the nuts. Most pretty girls might be stupid, but the best of everything was none too good for Betty Wales, so thought her roommate.