Chapter 9 THE COMPLICATIONS OF LIFE

By the middle of February basket-ball practice was in full swing again. The class teams had not yet been chosen, but every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon l9-'s last year's "regulars" and "subs" met in the gymnasium to play exciting matches. Of course there were some changes in the make- up of the teams.

Two of the "sub" centres and a "regular" home had left college; the guard who sprained her ankle in the great game of the year before and whose place Katherine Kittredge had taken in the second half, was not allowed to risk another such injury; and one or two other players had lost interest in basket-ball and were devoting their energies to something else. So there was a chance for outsiders, and Betty Wales, who had almost "made" the freshman sub-team, was one of the new girls invited to play in the practice matches.

Helen Adams had cut basket-ball all her freshman year, because Miss Andrews never called the roll on basket-ball days. Now she could not get enough of it, nor of regular gym. On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons there were no classes, so she used to put on her gym. suit and go over to watch the teams. And if some player failed to appear or was late in arriving, T. Reed or Betty would suggest calling Helen down to take the absentee's place. Helen was painfully awkward and not very strong, but she had acquired T. Reed's habit of slipping under the outstretched arms of the enemy and T. Reed's fashion of setting her teeth and getting the ball in spite of opposition; and some of her plays were remarkably effective.

"I believe," Betty said to her one day, as they lay side by side in a sunny spot on the gym. floor, resting between the halves, "I believe, if you'd begun last year when the rest of us did, you might have been on one of the teams yourself."

Helen laughed a pleased little laugh. "Oh, no!" she said. "But I love to play with you sometimes, and I love to watch Theresa."

"Isn't she a wonder?" said Betty dreamily. "Do you remember that game, Helen? Wasn't it the most exciting thing? And this year it will be our turn to win. Bob Parker has seen the picked freshman teams play, and she thinks they haven't a chance against us."

"I hope you can be on the sub-team, Betty," said Helen.

"And I hope you can write your song for 19- to sing to its team," returned Betty gaily. "You haven't forgotten about our talk the day of the game, have you, Helen?"

"Oh, no!" said Helen, quickly. Not for worlds would she have let Betty know how much she counted on that song. She had written another little verse for her theme class, and that very morning it had come back with "Good work-charming lilt," scrawled across the margin. So Helen had high hopes for the song.

Just then the door of the gym. opened, and Lucy Merrifield, the president of 19-, came in.

"Hello, Lucy," chorused the group of sprawling figures nearest the door.

"You're just in time to see us do up the regular team," called Elizabeth

West, who captained the "subs."

"Thank you," returned Lucy, "but I can't stay to see you do any such unbecoming thing. I came on an errand to Betty Wales. Isn't she here?"

"Here I am," called Betty, scrambling upright and brushing the hair out of her eyes.

"I came to tell you that you've been appointed to the Students'

Commission, to serve until Christy Mason gets back," explained Lucy.

"Till Christy gets back?" repeated Betty in bewilderment.

"Yes, she's been called home very suddenly. Her mother is ill, and Christy is going to keep house and see to the children. She'll be away a month anyhow and perhaps all this term. And as there are a lot of important matters coming up just now, we decided that we would better appoint a substitute on the commission."

"I'm afraid I can't be much help," began Betty, doubtfully.

"Oh, yes, you can," declared Lucy. "Come to the meeting to-morrow at two, and we'll give you plenty to help about."

"Time's up," called the captain of the regulars, and Lucy ran for the door, leaving Betty in a state of pleased excitement. Dorothy King was president of her class this year, and therefore also president of the Students' Commission. Marion Lawrence was a representative from the junior class. To be even a temporary member of so august an assembly seemed to Betty a very great privilege. She was so busy wondering who had chosen her,-whether Lucy or the whole commission,-and what to-morrow's meeting would be like, that she deliberately threw the ball twice toward the wrong basket and never discovered her mistake until Elizabeth West begged her please to "come to" and help her own side a little just for variety.

On the way home Betty met Miss Ferris. "Come and have tea with me, little girl," she said.

"Could I, like this?" asked Betty wistfully, pulling back her rain-coat to show her gym. suit and the tightly braided pig-tails tucked inside.

Miss Ferris laughed. "I shouldn't mind, but some one else might drop in.

It takes me ten minutes to make tea. Now run!"

Exactly nine minutes and a half later. Betty, looking very slender and stately in a clinging blue gown and a big plumed hat, her cheeks pink with excitement and her hair blown into fascinating ringlets from her brisk run across the campus, knocked timidly on Miss Ferris's door.

"Come in," called Miss Ferris. "You're early. The water hasn't boiled."

"It used to take me half an hour to dress, at the very fastest," said Betty, slipping into a low chair by the fire, where she could watch Miss Ferris making tea in a fat little silver pot, and pouring it into cups so thin and beautiful that Betty hardly dared touch hers, and breathed a deep sigh of relief when it was safely emptied and out of her hands.

Just as she was leaving, she told Miss Ferris about her appointment to the Students' Commission.

"Well," said Miss Ferris, "that won't be new work for you. You were an ex-officio member last year."

Betty looked puzzled.

"What you did for Miss Watson was Students' Commission work," explained Miss Ferris. "And judging by the position Miss Watson seems to be taking this year, I should call it very good work indeed."

[Illustration: "WELL," SAID MISS FERRIS, "THAT WON'T BE NEW WORK"]

"But you did it, not I," protested Betty.

"I did my part, you did yours," corrected Miss Ferris. "To be successful nowadays, you know, you must not only work yourself, but you must get other people to work for you."

"Yes," said Betty, vaguely. Then she laughed. "I'm afraid that I do the second more than the first, Miss Ferris. My roommate thinks that I get a great deal too much out of other people. And when I was at home Nan used to tell me to be more independent and see how I could get along if I were left on a desert island."

Miss Ferris smiled across the fire at her dainty little guest. "The best things in the world,-which fortunately isn't a desert island,-come about by cooperation," she said. "Be independent; think for yourself, of course, but get all the help you can from other people in carrying out your thoughts."

The dinner-bell began to jangle noisily in the hall and Betty rose hastily. "I've stayed too long," she said, "but I always do that when I come to see you. I shall tell my roommate what you said. Do you suppose I shall ever learn to think up arguments for myself?"

"Of course," said Miss Ferris, encouragingly. "That's one thing you're here for-to learn to argue and to dress in a hurry and to work on Students' Commissions. You'll master them all in time. Good-bye."

When Betty got back to the Belden House the bell had rung there too, and as the girls stood about in the halls and parlors waiting for Mrs. Cass, the matron, to lead them in to dinner, they were all discussing what Mary Brooks could mean by a "hair-raising."

"It sounds like a house-raising," said a girl from Nebraska. "I mean the sort of thing they have away out west, where laborers are scarce and the whole town turns out to help a man get up the timbers of his house."

"But there's no sense to that kind of a hair-raising," objected the Nebraskan's roommate, who was from Boston. "I think that Mary has invented a hair tonic and is going to try it on us before she has it patented."

"I'm sure I hope so," said Madeline Ayres, patting her diminutive twist of hair tenderly.

"Why, it's some kind of party she's giving for her mother," announced a stately senior, authoritatively.

"I don't see how that tells what it is, though," said Betty. "Am I invited?"

"Yes," explained Helen Adams. "Mary came in while you were out and asked us."

"But she hasn't said anything about expecting her mother."

At this everybody laughed and Marion Lawrence explained that Mary, being a very busy person, had a habit of putting away her letters unopened, until she found time to read them.

"And somehow she thought this was a book-bill from Longstreet's-you know how near-sighted she is-so she stuck it into her desk until she got her next month's allowance. But to-day she found some money that she'd put in her collar-case for safe-keeping and forgotten about; so she got out the bill to pay it, and it turned out to be a letter from her mother, saying she was coming up tonight. Mary wouldn't have her know for anything, so she decided to give a hair-raising to-night, as if she'd planned for it days ahead."

"But what is it?" demanded Betty.

If Miss Lawrence was in Mary's confidence she had no intention of betraying it; and there was nothing to do but wait for eight o'clock, the hour which Mary had mentioned in her invitations. Promptly on the moment all those bidden to the hair-raising made a rush for Mary's room.

"She hasn't come back from taking dinner with her mother," said Helen.

"Her transom is dark."

But "come in, children," called Mary, sociably, and opening the door just wide enough to admit one girl at a time she disclosed a room absolutely dark save for a gleam of light from a Turkish lantern in one corner.

"Goodness!" cried Betty, who went in first. "What am I running into? Oh, it's a skeleton."

"I'm all mixed up with a snake," added Katherine. "I feel my hair rising already."

"Girls, I want you to meet my mother," said Mary, briskly.

"Here I am," called a sweet voice from the shadows. "Wouldn't you better turn on the lights for a moment, daughter?"

"No, indeed," retorted Mary, firmly. "They're nothing to see, dear, I assure you, but if you insist on seeing them you can all go across to Laurie's room and come back after you've had a general inspection."

So everybody filed over to Marion Lawrence's room, where it was discovered that Mary's mother was, as Betty Wales put it, "a perfect little darling." She was small, like Mary, and she looked so young that Katherine gravely asked Mary if she was quite sure she wasn't palming off a sister on them instead of a mother. She entered into all the absurdities of the hair-raising, which proved to be only a particularly diverting sort of ghost party, with as much zest as any of the girls, and her ghost stories were the feature of the evening.

"You see, dear," explained Mary, when the lights were finally turned on and the hair-raising had resolved itself into a spread, "you see I had a hair-raising because you tell ghost stories so well. Why, ever since I read your letter I've been planning how I should show you off-Oh, mother, it's too good to keep." And Mary regaled her mother with the story of the neglected book-bill.

"Speaking of lost letters," said Marion Lawrence, "there's a letter for Frances West over on the zoology bulletin board in Science Hall. It's been there for two weeks."

"What a funny place for it!" said Mary. "Frances never as much as sticks her head inside Science Hall. She thinks it's wrong to cut up frogs and angle-worms. How did it get there, Laurie?"

"Postman dropped it, probably, and somebody who didn't know any better stuck it up there-the janitor, maybe."

"Perhaps Frances dropped it herself," suggested Madeline Ayres.

Marion shook her head. "Anyhow if she did, she hasn't read it. I noticed that it hadn't been opened."

"Perhaps it's a letter like Mary's, saying that her mother is coming," suggested Helen Adams.

"Guess again. It can't be that, because her mother wouldn't direct a letter to the editor-in-chief of the 'Argus.'"

"Hear that, Dottie," called Mary Brooks to Dorothy King, who was sitting

on the divan below the Turkish lantern, talking busily with Mrs. Brooks.

"There's a letter for your chief over on the zoology bulletin board.

You'd better stop in and get it for her."

"Isn't it funny," said Rachel Morrison, "that, as well as Frances West is known in college and as many juniors and seniors as look at that bulletin board, nobody has thought to take her the letter."

"Why didn't you take it to her, Laurie?" asked Mary severely.

"Oh, because I wanted to see how long it would stop there if I didn't take it," returned Marion easily. "I'm writing a theme on 'What's everybody's business is nobody's business,' and I want to get the psychology right. Oh, Mrs. Brooks," she called, getting up and going over to the divan, "did you know that Mary had set a fashion up here? Ever since her 'Rumor' story, we're all racking our brains to see if we can't get up some psychological experiments that will make Professor Hinsdale think we're clever too."

"And most of you," said Mary loftily, "just succeed in making your friends uncomfortable. I hope Frances' letter won't upset her the way mine did."

"Oh, I guess it isn't a hair-raiser," said Marion easily. "It's probably a bill for printer's ink or paper, or whatever they buy for the 'Argus.' You get it to-morrow, Dottie, and then you can tell us what is in it."

"I will," said Dorothy.

Just as she spoke the twenty-minute-to-ten bell clanged suggestively in the corridors, and the hair-raising came to an abrupt end.

"I don't think I care much for hair-raisings," said Betty, as she and Helen made hasty preparations for bed. "I think you have enough to worry about and be frightened over, without getting up a lot of extra things on purpose. I can hear that blood-hound panting under the window this very minute. Isn't Mrs. Brooks a wonderful story-teller?"

"Yes. I didn't suppose you were ever worried or frightened over things," said Helen.

"Well, I am," returned Betty. "I'm worrying this very minute about my to- morrow's recitations. I'd planned to study tonight but how could I hurt Mary's feelings by not going to the hair-raising? I suppose," went on Betty, when Helen did not answer, "I suppose you want to ask why I don't sit up to study? But if I did I should be breaking a rule, and besides," concluded Betty, yawning prodigiously, "I am altogether too sleepy to sit up, so I am just going to sleep and forget all my troubles." And Betty suited the action to the word.

A few moments later she roused herself. "Life is just full of things to decide, isn't it, Helen? And so often you can't tell which one is best- like me going to the hair-raising to-night, or Marion Lawrence and that letter."

"I think she ought to have delivered the letter," said Helen.

"But it was such fun not to," objected Betty. "And probably it was only an advertisement. Now I'm really going to sleep."