Betty Wales Senior | Page 4

through France. She looked more elegant than ever in a chic little suit from Paris, with a toque to match, and heavy gloves that she had bought in London.
"I've got a pair for each of you in my trunk," she announced, "and here's hoping I didn't mix up the sizes."
"Sixes for me," cried Bob.
"Five and a-half," shrieked Babe.
"Six and a-half," announced Katherine, "and you ought to have brought me two pairs, because I wear mine out more than twice as fast as anybody else."
"What kind of a summer have you had, K?" asked Babe, who never wrote letters, and therefore seldom received any.
"Same old kind," answered Katherine cheerfully. "Mended twenty dozen stockings, got breakfast for seven hungry mouths every morning, played tennis with the boys and Polly, tutored all I could, sent out father's bills,--oh, being the oldest of eight is no snap, I can tell you, but," Katherine added with a chuckle, "it's lots of fun. Boys do like you so if you're rather decent to them."
"I just hate being an only child," declared Bob hotly. "What's the use of a place in the country unless there are children to wade in the brook, and chase the chickens and ride the horses? Next summer I'm going to have fresh-air children up there all summer, and you two"--indicating the other B's--"have got to come and help save them from early deaths."
"All right," said Babe easily, "only I shall wade too."
"And you've got to wash them up before I can touch them," stipulated the fastidious Babbie. "Where have you been all summer, Rachel?"
"Right at home, helping in an office during the day and tutoring evenings. And I've saved enough so that I shan't have to worry one single bit about money this year," announced Rachel triumphantly.
"Good for old Rachel!" cried Madeline Ayres, who had spent the summer nursing her mother through a severe illness and looked worn and thin in consequence. "Then you're as glad to get back to the grind as I am. Betty here, with her summer on an island in Lake Michigan, and Eleanor, and these lucky B's with their childless farms, and their Parisian raiment, don't know what it's like to be back in the arms of one's friends."
"Don't we!" cried a protesting chorus.
"Don't you what?" called a voice out of the darkness, and the real Georgia Ames, cheerful and sunburned and self-possessed shook hands all around, and found a seat behind Madeline on the piazza railing.
"You were all so busy talking that you didn't see me at the train," she explained coolly. "A tall girl with glasses asked if there was anything she could do for me, and I said oh, no, that I'd been here before. Then she asked me my name, and when I said Georgia Ames, I thought she was going to faint."
"She took you for a ghost, my dear," said Madeline, patting her double's shoulder affectionately. "You must get used to being treated that way, you know. You're billed to make a sensation in spite of yourself."
"But we're going to make it up to you all we can," chirped Babbie.
"And you bet we can," added Bob decisively.
"Let's begin by escorting her home," suggested Babe. "There's just about time before ten."
"I saw Miss Stuart yesterday about her coming into the Belden," explained Betty, after they had left Georgia at her temporary off-campus boarding place. "She was awfully nice and amused about it all, and she thinks she can get her in right away, in Natalie Smith's place. Natalie's father has been elected senator, you know, and she's going to come out this winter in Washington."
"Fancy that now!" said Madeline resignedly. "There's certainly no accounting for tastes."
"I should think not," declared Katherine hotly. "If my father was elected President, I'd stay on and graduate with 19-- just the same."
"Of course you would," agreed Babbie. "You can come out in Washington any time--or if you can't, it doesn't matter much. But there's only one 19--."
"And yet when we go we shan't be missed," said Katherine sadly. "The college will go on just the same."
"Oh, and I've found out the reason why," cried Betty eagerly. "It's because all college girls are alike. Miss Ferris said so once. She said if you waited long enough each girl you had known and liked would come back in the person of some younger one. But I never really believed it until to-day." And Betty related the story of her successful hunt for the freshman who was like herself.
Everybody laughed.
"But then," asserted Babbie loyally, "she's not so nice as you, Betty. She couldn't be. And I don't believe there are freshmen like all of us."
"Not in this one class," said Rachel. "But it's a nice idea, isn't it? When our little sisters or our daughters come to Harding they can