Betty Wales, Junior: A Story for Girls — Background and Themes

Wales were freshmen together at Mrs. Chapin's. Mary Brooks, the only sophomore in the house, did her best to make life a burden to them in the amusing but innocent fashion that hazing takes at Harding. The good times they all had together and Betty's trials with Helen Adams, who fell to her lot as roommate, and with Eleanor Watson, whom she admired for her cleverness and over whom she managed to exert a strong influence for good, are recounted in "Betty Wales, Freshman."

When they were sophomores most of the Chapin House girls moved to the campus, where they were distributed among the various college dwelling-houses, there to find new interests and make new friends. Chief among the latter was Madeline Ayres, the girl from "Bohemia, New York," whose original and always artistic ideas for everything from political parades and vaudeville shows to the arrangement of a room and the soothing of an irate editor won her vast popularity. Another important addition was Dora Carlson--Eleanor Watson's freshman she was called, from her dog-like devotion to Eleanor. Dora and Betty between them, with some help from Madeline and some from Miss Ferris, a friend on the college faculty, kept Eleanor from utterly ruining her career at Harding. A story not her own that she printed in the college magazine made no end of trouble for Eleanor and her friends, but in spite of that the sophomore year was a merry one. Indeed I think that Betty Wales and her set entered upon their junior year with the firm conviction that you couldn't help having a good time at Harding--even if you tried.

THE FUN OF JUNIOR YEAR

"Hello, Betty Wales. Please amuse me."

Betty was sitting on the floor of her own long-coveted "single," surrounded by a bewildering array of her possessions, which she had unpacked according to her own particular system of taking everything out at once, and now, as usual, she had no idea where to dispose of them. At the sound of the voice, the unwonted pucker of anxiety left her forehead, and she jumped up, scattering the photographs she had been sorting right and left, and made a rush for the newcomer.

"Oh, Mary Brooks! Maybe I'm not glad to see you. I'm--I think I'm homesick."

Mary grinned cheerfully. "You ought to be used to it by this time--to the joys of being back on time, I mean. It's I that have reasons for feeling like a little lost lamb. Do you know, this is positively my first appearance at the regular opening functions."

"Really?" laughed Betty. "What's going to happen?"

"Nothing new, I hope," said Mary; "but Miss Stuart delicately hinted that the wrath of Jove would descend upon me if I didn't get here on time. Where's everybody?"

"I don't know," said Betty sadly. "Didn't you come on the eight-fifteen?"

"I did," returned Mary with decision. "Ever since I entered college I have heard about the joyousness of coming up on the eight-fifteen on an opening night. And now I get here on time for once, and the New York and the western trains are all fiendishly late. So I come up alone in my glory on that famous eight-fifteen, and instead of a gay and festive occasion such as I have been led to expect, I find an empty house--not a soul but you to talk to, and positively nothing doing. They seem to be all new girls on my corridor."

"I don't think you ought to refer to freshmen as an empty house," said Betty severely, "and anyhow it serves you right for all the times you have cut over."

"When did you come?" asked Mary, apparently considering that one topic had been pursued far enough. "You haven't done all this"--she indicated the miscellaneous results of Betty's unpacking by a sweeping gesture--"in just this one evening?"

"Rather not," said Betty. "Mary, I've been here two whole days--not in the Belden of course, because it wasn't open, but in Harding; and I think that if you hadn't come just when you did, I should have--cried," ended Betty, in a sudden burst of confidence.

"You poor thing!" said Mary sympathetically. "I suppose it was a freshman cousin or something."