“Teddie Wilson has gone and got herself conditioned in psych.,” announced Bob Parker, bouncing unceremoniously through Betty’s half-open door.

“Oh, Bob!” Betty’s tone was fairly tragic. “Does that mean that she can’t try for a part in the play?”

Bob nodded. “Cast-iron rule. And she’d have made a perfect Gobbo, young or old, and a stunning Gratiano. Well, her being out of it will give K. a better chance.”

“But I’m sure Katherine wouldn’t want her chance to come this way,” said Betty sadly. “Besides—oh, Bob, have you looked at the bulletin-board this afternoon?”

“Babe did,” said Bob with a grin, “so you needn’t worry yet, my child. Ted says she ought to have expected it, because she’d cut a lot and let things go awfully,—depended on the—faculty—knowing—us—well—enough by—this—time—to—pass—over—any small—deficiencies, and all that sort of talk. And this just shows, she says, how well they do know her. She’s awfully plucky about it, but she cares. I didn’t suppose Ted had it in her to care so about anything,” declared Bob solemnly. “But of course it’s a lot to lose—the star comedy part that was going to be handed out to her by her admiring little classmates, who think that nobody can act like Teddie. I wish I was as sure of a part in the mob.”

“What are you going to try for, Bob?” asked Betty sympathetically.

Bob blushed. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with a fine assumption of indifference. “Everybody says that you ought to begin at the top and then the grateful committee won’t forget to throw you a crumb when they get to passing out the ‘supers.’” Bob paused and her air of unconcern dropped from her like a mask. “I say, Betty, I do want my family to be proud of me for once. Promise you won’t laugh if I come up for Bassanio.”

“Of course I won’t,” said Betty indignantly. “I’m sure you’ll make love beautifully. Do you know who’s going to try for Shylock?”

“Only Jean Eastman,” said Bob, “and Christy and Emily are thinking of it. I came up from down-town with Jean just now. She thinks she’s got a sure thing, though of course she isn’t goose enough to say so. If Kate Denise gets Portia, as everybody seems to think she will, it will be quite like freshman year, with the Hill crowd on top all around. I think Jean has been aiming for that, and I also think—you don’t mind if I say it, Betty?”

“I haven’t the least idea what you’re going to say,” laughed Betty, “but I don’t believe I shall mind.”

“Well,” said Bob earnestly, “I think Jean’s counting on you to help her with her Shylock deal.”

“I help her!” said Betty in bewilderment. “How could I?”

“What a little innocent you are, Betty Wales,” declared Bob. “Have you forgotten that you are on the all-powerful play-committee, and that you five and Miss Kingston, head of the elocution department, practically decide upon the cast?”

“Oh!” said Betty slowly. “But I can’t see why Jean should expect me to push her, of all people.”

“She’ll remind you why,” said Bob, “or perhaps she expects me to do it for her. Can’t you honestly think of anything that she might make a handle of?”

Betty considered, struggling to recall her recent meetings with Jean. “She has been extra-cordial lately,” she said, “but she hasn’t done anything in particular—oh, Bob, I know what you mean. She expects me to help her because she nominated me for the committee.”

Bob nodded. “As if fifty other people wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t. I may be wrong, Betty, but she had a lot to say all the way up from Cuyler’s about how glad she was that you were on the committee, how she felt you were the only one for the place and was glad the girls agreed with her, how hard she had talked you up beforehand, and so on,—all about her great and momentous efforts in your behalf. I told her that Miss Ferris said once that you had a perfect command of the art of dress and that every one knew you planned the costumes for the Belden play and for the Dramatic Club’s masque last spring, also that Barbara Gordon particularly wanted you on if she was chairman, so I didn’t see that you needed any great amount of talking up. But she laughed her horrid, sarcastic little laugh and said she guessed I hadn’t had much experience with class politics.”

Betty’s eyes flashed angrily. “And in return for what she did, she expects me to work for her, no matter whether or not I think she would make the best Shylock. Is that what you mean, Bob?”

“Yes, but perhaps I was mistaken,” said Bob soothingly, “and any way I doubt if she ever says anything to you directly. She’ll just drop judicious hints in the ears of your worldly friends, who can be trusted to appreciate the debt of gratitude you owe her.”

“Bob.” Betty stared at her hard for a moment. “You don’t think—oh, of course you don’t! The parts in the play ought to go to the ones who can do them best and the committee ought not to think of anybody or anything but that.”

“And I know at least one committee woman who won’t think of anybody or anything but that,” declared Bob loyally. “I only thought I’d tell you about Jean so that, if she should say anything, you would be ready for her. Now I must go and study Bassanio,” and Bob departed murmuring,

“‘What find I here?
Fair Portia’s counterfeit?’”

in tones so amorous that Belden House Annie, who was sweeping on the stairs, dropped her dust-pan with a clatter, declaring that she was “jist overcome, that she was!”

“Which was the only compliment my acting of Bassanio ever got,” Bob told her sadly afterward.

Betty was still hot with indignation over Bob’s disclosures when Roberta Lewis knocked on the door. Roberta was wrapped up in a fuzzy red bath-robe, a brown sweater and a pink crÊpe shawl, and she looked the picture of shivering dejection.

“What in the world is the matter?” demanded Betty, emptying her history notebooks out of the easy-chair and tucking Roberta in with a green and yellow afghan, which completed the variegated color scheme to perfection.

“Please don’t bother about me,” said Roberta forlornly. “I’m going back in a minute. I’ve lost my wedding-pin—Miss Hale’s wedding-pin—well, you know what I mean,—and caught a perfectly dreadful cold.”

“You don’t think that your pin was stolen?” asked Betty quickly. There had been no robberies in the college since Christmas, and the girls were beginning to hope that the mysterious thief had been discouraged by their greater care in locking up their valuables, and had gone off in search of more lucrative territory.

“Yes, I do think so,” said Roberta. “I almost know it. You see I hadn’t been wearing my pin. I only took it out to show Polly Eastman, because she hadn’t happened to see one. Then K. came and we went off to walk. I left the pin right on my dressing-table and now it’s gone. But the queerest part is that Georgia Ames was in my room almost all the time, because hers was being swept, and before that she was in Lucy Mann’s, with the door wide open into the hall, and my door open right opposite. And yet she never saw or heard anything. Isn’t it strange?”

“She was probably busy talking and didn’t notice,” said Betty. “People are everlastingly tramping through the halls, until you don’t think anything about it. Have you looked on the floor and in all your drawers? It’s probably tumbled down somewhere and got caught in a crack under the dressing-table or the rug.”

“No, I’ve looked in all those places,” said Roberta with finality. “You know I haven’t as many things to look through as you.”

“Please don’t be sarcastic,” laughed Betty, for Roberta’s belongings were all as trim and tailor-made as herself. “How did you get your cold?”

“Why K. and I got caught in a miserable little snow flurry,” explained Roberta, pulling the pink shawl closer, “and—I got my feet wet. My throat’s horribly sore. It won’t be well for a week, and I can’t try for the play.”

Roberta struggled out of the encumbering folds of the green afghan and trailed her other draperies swiftly to the window, whose familiar view she seemed to find intensely absorbing.

“Oh, yes, you can,” said Betty comfortingly. “Why, your throat may be all right by to-morrow, and anyway it’s only the Portia and Shylock trials that come then. Were you going to try for either of those parts?”

“Yes,” gulped Roberta thickly.

Behind Roberta’s back Betty was free to pucker her mouth into a funny little grimace that denoted amusement, surprise and sympathy, all together. “Then I’ll ask Barbara Gordon to give you a separate trial later,” she said kindly. “Nothing will be really decided to-morrow. We only make tentative selections to submit to Mr. Masters when he comes up next week. He’s the professional coach, you know.”

But Roberta turned back from the window to shake her head. “I wouldn’t have you do that for anything,” she said, brushing away the tears. “I’ll try for something else if I get well in time. I’m going to bed now. Will you please ask Annie to bring up my dinner? And Betty, don’t ever say I meant to try for Shylock. I don’t know why I told you, except that you always understand.”

Betty felt that she didn’t quite understand this time, but she promised to tell Annie and come in late herself to conduct another search for the missing pin. She had just succeeded in dismissing Ted, Jean and Roberta from her mind and concentrating it on the next day’s history lesson, when Helen Adams appeared.

“Helen,” began Betty solemnly, “if you’ve got any troubles connected with trying for parts in the play, please don’t divulge them. I don’t believe I can stand any more complications.”

“Poor thing!” said Helen compassionately. “I know how you feel from the times I have with the ‘Argus.’ Well, I shan’t bother you about trying for a part. I should just love to act, but I can’t and I know it. I only wanted to borrow some tea, and to tell you that Anne Carter has come to return my call. You know you said you’d like to meet her.”

So Betty brushed her curls smooth and, stopping to pick up Madeline on her way, went in to meet Miss Carter, whose shyness and silence melted rapidly before Betty’s tactful advances and Madeline’s appreciative references to her verses in the last “Argus.”

While Helen made the tea, Miss Carter amused them all with a droll account of her efforts to learn to play basket-ball, “because Miss Adams says it throws so much light on the philosophy of college life.”

“Then you never played before you came here?” asked Betty idly, stirring her tea.

Miss Carter shook her head. “I prepared for college in a convent in Canada. The sisters would have been horribly shocked at the idea of our tearing about in bloomers and throwing a ball just like the boys.”

“Oh!” said Betty, with a sudden flash of recognition. “Then it was at the convent where you got the beautiful French accent that mademoiselle raves over. You’re in my senior French class. I ought to have remembered you.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” said Miss Carter bitterly, and then she flushed and apologized. “I’m so ugly that I’m always glad not to be remembered or noticed. But I didn’t mean to say so, and I do hope you’ll come to see me, both of you,—if seniors ever do come to see sophomores.”

The girls laughingly assured her that seniors did sometimes condescend so far, and she went off with a happy look in her great gray eyes.

“We must have her in the ‘Merry Hearts,’” said Madeline. “She’s our kind if she can only get over that morbid feeling about her scar.”

“But we must be very careful,” Helen warned them, with a vivid remembrance of her first interview with Miss Carter. “We mustn’t ask her to join until most of us have been to see her and really made friends. She would just hate to feel that we pitied her.”

“We’ll be careful,” Betty promised her. “I’ll go to see her, for one, the very first of next week,” and she skipped gaily off to dress for dinner. After all there were plenty of things in the world besides the class play with its unhappy tangle of rivalries and heartburnings.

“And what’s the use of borrowing trouble?” Betty inquired the next evening of the green lizard. “If you do, you never borrow the right kind.”

Jean, to be sure, had done a good deal to justify Bob’s theory. She had remembered an urgent message from home which must be delivered to Polly immediately after luncheon, and she kept her innocent little cousin busily engaged in conversation in the lower hall of the Belden House until Betty appeared, having waited until the very last minute in the vain hope of avoiding Jean. But when they opened the door there was Barbara Gordon, also bound for Miss Kingston’s office, and much relieved to find that her committee were not all waiting indignantly for their chairman’s tardy arrival. So whatever Jean had meant to say to Betty in private necessarily went unsaid.

And then, after all her worriment, Jean was the best Shylock!

“Which is perfectly comical considering Bob’s suspicions,” Betty told the green lizard, the only confidant to whom she could trust the play committee’s state-secrets.

All the committee had been astonished at Jean’s success, and most of them were disappointed. Christy or Emily Davis would have been so much pleasanter to work with, or even Kitty Lacy, whom Miss Kingston considered very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her early in her freshman year.

“And because she’s Kitty, it isn’t safe to give her another chance,” said Miss Kingston regretfully, when the fifteen aspiring Shylocks had played their parts and the committee were comparing opinions. “Yes, I agree with Barbara that Jean Eastman is by far the most promising candidate, but——”

“But you don’t think she’s very good, now do you, Miss Kingston?” asked Clara Ellis, a rather lugubrious individual, who had been put on the committee because she was a “prod” in “English lit.,” and not because she had the least bit of executive ability.

Miss Kingston hesitated. “Why no, Clara, I don’t. I’m afraid she won’t work up well; she doesn’t seem to take criticism very kindly. But it’s too soon to judge of that. At present she certainly has a much better conception of the part than any of the others.”

“You don’t think we’ve been too ambitious, do you, Miss Kingston?” asked Barbara, anxiously. Barbara knew Jean well and the prospect of managing the play with her capricious, selfish temperament to be catered to at every turn was not a pleasant one.

“I’ve thought so all along,” put in Clara Ellis, decidedly, before Miss Kingston had had a chance to answer. “I think we ought to have made sure of a good Shylock before we voted to give this play. It will be perfectly awful to make a fizzle of it, and everything depends on getting a good Shylock, doesn’t it, Miss Kingston?”

“A great deal certainly depends on that,” agreed Miss Kingston. “But it’s much too early to decide that you can’t get a good Shylock.”

“Why, who else is there?” demanded Clara, dismally. “Surely every possible and impossible person has tried to-day.”

Nobody seemed ready to answer this argument, and Betty, glancing at the doleful faces of her fellow-workers felt very much depressed until a new idea struck her.

“Miss Kingston,” she said, “there have been fifteen senior plays at Harding, haven’t there? And hasn’t each one been better than any of those that came before it?”

“So each class and its friends have thought,” admitted Miss Kingston, smiling at Betty’s eagerness, “and in the main I think they have been right.”

“Then,” said Betty, looking appealingly at Clara and Barbara, “I guess we can safely go on thinking that our play will be still better. 19— is the biggest class that ever graduated here, and it’s certainly one of the brightest.”

Everybody laughed at this outburst of patriotism and the atmosphere brightened immediately, so Betty felt that perhaps she was of some use on the committee even if she couldn’t understand all Clara’s easy references to glosses and first folio readings, or compare Booth’s interpretation of Shylock with Irving’s as glibly as Rachel did.

Just then there was a smothered giggle outside the door and six lusty voices chanted, “By my troth, our little bodies are a-weary of these hard stairs,” in recognition of which pathetic appeal the committee hastily dismissed the subject of Shylock in order to hear what the impatient Portias had to say. They did so well, and there was such a lively discussion about the respective merits of Kate Denise, Babbie Hildreth and Nita Reese that the downcast spirits, of the committee were fully restored, and they went home to dinner resolved not to lose heart again no matter what happened, which is the most sensible resolution that any senior play committee can make.

When Betty got home she found a note waiting for her on the hall table addressed in Tom Alison’s sprawling hand and containing an invitation to Yale commencement.

“I’m asking you early,” Tom wrote, “so that you can plan for it, and be so much the surer not to disappoint me. Alice Waite is coming with Dick Grayson, and some of the other fellows will have Harding girls. My mother is going to chaperon the bunch.

“Do you remember my kid roommate, Ashley Dwight? He’s junior president this year. He’s heard a lot about Georgia Ames, real and ideal, and he’s crazy to see what the visible part of her is like. I think he meditates asking her to the prom, and making a sensation with her. Can’t I bring him up to call on you some day when the real Miss Ames will probably be willing to amuse Ashley?”

As Betty joyously considered how she should answer all this, she remembered the four box tickets for the Glee Club concert that Lucile Merrifield had promised to get her—Lucile was business manager of the mandolin club this year. Betty had intended to invite Alice Waite and two Winsted men, but there was no reason why she shouldn’t ask Georgia, Tom, and the junior president instead. So she went straight to Georgia’s room.

“All right,” said Georgia calmly, when Betty had explained her project. “I was going to stand up with a crowd of freshmen, but they won’t care.”

“Georgia Ames,” broke in her roommate severely, “I should like to see you excited for once. Don’t you know the difference between going stand-up with a lot of other freshmen, and sitting in a box with Miss Wales and two Yale men?”

“Of course I know the difference,” said Georgia, smiling good-naturedly. “Didn’t I say that I’d go in the box? But you see, Caroline, if you are only a namesake of Madeline Ayres’s deceased double you mustn’t get too much excited over the wonderful things that happen to you. Must you, Betty?”

“I don’t think you need any pointers from me, Georgia,” said Betty laughingly. “Has Caroline seen you studying yet?”

“Once,” said Georgia sadly.

“But it was in mid-year week,” explained the roommate, “the night before the Livy exam. She mended stockings all the evening and then she said she was going to sit up to study. She began at quarter past ten.”

“Propped up in bed, to be quite comfortable,” interpolated Georgia.

“And at half-past ten,” went on her roommate, “she said she was so sleepy that she couldn’t stand it any longer. So she tumbled the books and extra pillows on the floor and went to sleep.”

“Too bad you spoiled your record just for those few minutes,” laughed Betty, “but I’ll take you to the concert all the same,” and she hurried off to dress.

At dinner she entertained her end of the table with an account of Georgia’s essay at cramming.

“But that doesn’t prove that she never studies,” Madeline defended her protÉgÉe. “That first floor room of theirs is a regular rendezvous for all the freshmen in the house, so she’s very sensible to keep away from it when she’s busy.”

“Where does she go?”

“Oh, to the library, I suppose,” said Madeline. “Most of the freshmen study there a good deal, and she camps down in Lou Waterson’s room, afternoons, because Lou has three different kinds of lab. to go to, so she’s never at home.”

“Well, it’s a wonder that Georgia isn’t completely spoiled,” said Nita Reese. “Just to think of the things that child has had done for her!”

And certainly if Georgia’s head had not been very firmly set on her square shoulders, it would have been hopelessly turned by her meteoric career at Harding. For weeks after college opened she was a spectacle, a show-sight of the place. Old girls pointed her out to one another in a fashion that was meant to be inobtrusive but that would have flattered the vanity of any other freshman. Freshmen were regaled with stories about her, which they promptly retailed for her benefit, and then sent her flowers as a tribute to her good luck and a recognition of the amusement she added to the dull routine of life at Harding. Seniors who had been duped by the phantom Georgia asked her to Sunday dinner and introduced her to their friends, who did likewise. Foolish girls wanted her autograph, clever ones demanded to know her sensations at finding herself so oddly conspicuous, while the “Merry Hearts” amply fulfilled their promise to make up to her for unintentionally having forced her into a curious prominence. But Georgia took it all as a mere matter of course, smiled blandly at the stories, accepted the flowers and the invitations, wrote the autographs, and explained that she guessed her sensations weren’t at all remarkable,—they were just like any other freshman’s.

“All the same,” Madeline declared, whenever the subject came up, “she’s absolutely unique. If the other Georgia had never existed, this one would have made her mark here.”

But just how she would have done it even Madeline could not decide. The real Georgia was not like other girls, but in what fundamental way she was different it was difficult to say. Indeed now that the “Merry Hearts” came to know her better, she was almost as much of a puzzle to them as the other Georgia had been to the rest of the college.