Betty Wales, Sophomore | Page 8

poor child like a hot coal the minute she felt inclined to.
Even Betty Wales failed to understand Eleanor's interest in the quaint little freshman, and she and the other Chapin house girls rallied her heartily about Miss Carlson's open and unbounded adoration.
"Please don't encourage the poor thing so," laughed Katherine, one day not long after the reception. "Why, yesterday morning at chapel I looked up in the gallery and there she was in the front row, hanging over the railing as far as she dared, with her eyes glued to you. Some day she'll fall off, and then think how you'll feel, when the president talks about the terrible evils of the crush system, and stares straight at you."
Eleanor took their banter with perfect good-nature, and seemed rather pleased than otherwise at Miss Carlson's devotion.
"I like her," she said stoutly. "That's why I encourage her, as you call it. Now, Helen Adams doesn't interest me at all. She keeps herself to herself too much. But Dora Carlson is so absolutely frank and straightforward, and so competent and quick to see through things. She ought to have been a man. Then she could go west and make her fortune, As it is--" Eleanor shrugged her shoulders, in token that she had no feasible suggestion ready in regard to Dora Carlson's future.
To Betty, in private, she went much further. "You don't know what you did for me, Betty, when you made me ask that child to the reception. Nobody ever cared for me, or trusted me, as she does--or for the reasons that she does. I hope I can show her that I'm worth it, but it's going to be hard work. And it will be a bad thing for her, and a worse thing for me, if I fail."

CHAPTER III
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