"Oh, dear!" I said at last, "I wish we had taken a berth together and saved our two dollars and a half apiece."
I heard her give a little gasp and I felt her staring at me. The next minute she said, "There are crumbs on your necktie too." And then she bent down her head and laughed and laughed and laughed till I had to laugh too.
"I hope it'll be a lesson to us," I said at last.
She wiped the tears from her lashes. "It will be. I expect to be repenting for weeks ahead,--at least, until my next allowance comes in. But, you! Why, Miss Leigh, it seems so queer. I thought the college girl was different as a rule--independent and frank and--oh, pardon me--and--and so forth."
"She is," I assured her sadly, "as a rule. But I am an exception. I prove the rule."
For her junior year Bea was fortunate enough to secure a mail-route, the proceeds of which helped to make her independent of a home allowance for spending money. To tell the truth, however, she enjoyed the work even more than the salary. While distributing the letters she felt a personal share in every delighted, "Oh, thank you!" in each ever-unsatisfied, "Is that all?" or the disappointed, "Nothing for me to-day?"
From her own experience and observation during the years already past, she was particularly interested in the different pairs of roommates who came within the scope of her daily trips. In a certain double lived two freshmen, one of whom always greeted her with, "Oh, thank you!" whether the mail was addressed to her or to her roommate. But when the roommate answered the knock, she invariably exclaimed, no matter how much was handed to her, "Is that all?"
More than once in her reports to Lila, Bea declared that it was about time for a wave of reform in the vicinity of Ethelwynne Bruce. Perhaps she might even have contemplated the possibility of engineering something of the kind herself, if she had not been too busy to spare the necessary thought-energy. In the course of events, fate with its machinery of circumstances added an extra lesson to Ethelwynne's college course.
It happened one evening during the skating season.
Ethelwynne with her skates jingling over her arm came shivering into the room. "Oo-oo-ooh!" Her teeth chattered. "Wynnie's freezing. Do shut that window and turn on the heat, Agnes. It is hard lines to live in a double with a regular Polar bear direct from the land of Sparta. You ought to keep it up as high as forty degrees anyhow."