Jermyn Street is one of those thoroughfares that look as if they never had had, and never had expected to have, any secrets. You feel no impulse to run up any of the neat wooden steps, and push any of the neat metal buttons. It does not seem worth while. The houses are all too new, and too stiff, and too much alike to be inviting - all, that is, until you come to the left-hand corner of the north end, where Jermyn Street crosses Lincoln Street. Ninety-five, the plate says.
Barbara Leighton was not a snob, but as she walked along Jermyn Street, she felt that the people who lived in it were probably as uninteresting as their houses.
"What can a girl be who lives on a street like this!" Barbara said to herself.
Seventy-nine - Eighty-one - Eighty-three - Barbara was looking for Ninety-five. Fearfully she scanned the big-paned windows set round with colored lights. Under her black jacket her shoulders straightened like those of a soldier going into action. How could Aunt Annabel have had the heart to do it!
And then suddenly she was face to face with Ninety-five, so little, so brown, so adorable, like a mischievous baby peeping out from the end of a long line of grown-up skirts. A white-flowered vine trailed over the tiny porch, with its settee and woven mats.
"Is Miss Dale at home?" Barbara asked the freckled boy at the door. "Miss Doris Dale?"
The girl who a moment later pushed aside the green portières as as little and trim and brown as the house. She had brown hair and brown skin, and she wore a brown and blue gingham dress, and brown shoes; she was alert, yet shy, like a squirrel. But her eyes, quite unexpectedly, were blue.
"You are Barbara Leighton," she said, quickly.
"I had to come," Barbara said, "to tell you that we needn't unless we want to."
"But why? Aren't we committed already?"
"You're never committed to anything unless you choose to be."
"Miss Frayne wished it," said Doris, simply.
Barbara leaned forward. "Do you want it? Or are you taking it to give me a chance?"
"I hadn't thought of that. My application has been in for three years, just so that in case I should find I could go, there'd be nothing to stand in the way. But you?" The soft voice lifted the question timidly.
"Aunt Annabel always told me she would send me to college when I was ready. My application went in three years ago, too."
"At her college, of course."
Barbara nodded. "What pulled you that way? Were you born to it like me?"
"Miss Frayne made me love it so. She made me think that if I could go there, I'd be the happiest girl in the world. She never asked me to, you know. But she talked about it. That was four years ago at the shore. And when she saw I was interested, she showed me pictures of the campus. And of course I read up on the history. When I began to dream college, nights, mother let me put in an application."
"I never read up about it," said Barbara. "Goodness, aren't you thoroughgoing! But of course I couldn't be a perfect ignoramus with Aunt Annabel in the family."
Suddenly Doris's blue eyes brimmed with tears. "Whatever made her do it?" she asked. "I never dreamed of her giving me a college education. It was lovely of her, so lovely it chokes me every time I think of it. But oh, if I had a dozen lives to live, and never went to college in a single one of them, I'd so much rather have her alive and well!"
"It was when they had told her she couldn't get well that she added to her will the part about us," said Barbara. "Did she ever talk to you about her pet scheme of having a summer-long house party at the beach some year, and inviting in squads all the people she knew who would like to know each other, and didn't? She was always telling me about you. 'There's a girl I want you to know sometime, Bab,' she would say."
"She talked to me about you, too."
"It was queer the way we kept missing each other."
"Once," said Doris, "you came down to the beach in the afternoon, and I had had to hurry away that morning. That was when Dan - my brother - got so badly poisoned by ivy in the mountains that somebody had to go and take care of him, and mother couldn't leave the children."
"And once some people came to visit us the very night before I was to start for the shore, and I had to stay and entertain them."
"So you think," said Doris, "that this is Miss Frayne's way of introducing us?"
"I do. You see, she had set her heart on our knowing each other, and when she found she couldn't bring us together at the shore, she left us each our pet desire - a college course - if we would room together our freshman year."
Doris flushed. "You said that we needn't do it."
"I thought you might not like me as a roommate."
"What about your liking me?"
"Aunt Annabel gave you a very good character."
"Then you'll hate me. Don't people always hate the ones whom they are recommended to like?"
Barbara smiled. "Shall we try it and see?"
"I'm willing if you are," Doris answered.
An hour and a half later, on the train speeding toward her own home, Barbara sought to fortify her spirit."It's only for a year," she thought. "And in college you're not tied to a roommate every hour of the day. Doris Dale isn't pretty, but she's pleasant. We'll get along. Only I wish Aunt Annabel hadn't always wanted me to know people who would do me good!"
At about the same time, upstairs in 95 Jermyn Street, a girl was whimsically questioning her reflection in a mirror. "Doris Dale, how can you ever live up to that girl for a whole year?"
The throng of girls in the lobby of the administration building thickened, fed from the stairways and the open front door The air was filled with a din of jubilant welcomes.
In a backwater on the edge of the throng stood Barbara Leighton and Doris Dale. Doris absorbed the scene quietly, yet with shy eagerness. Barbara watched, with her face alight.
"Do you suppose anybody will ever be so glad to see us?" asked a voice above her.
Barbara looked up into the face of one of the tallest girls she had ever seen. But the face was attractive.
"Next year," she answered, "maybe I'll be hugging you like that."
"Good! I thought you were a freshman, but you never can tell, can you, Fuzz?"
"At breakfast," explained the girl addressed as "Fuss," "she took a senior for a freshman."
"Well," said the tall girl, "when a person is the size of a minute, and wears hair that crinkles all over her head, like Fuzzy's here, how can anyone suspect she's a senior? Now see that short, towheaded girl squirming this way! She's a freshman, surely."
The towheaded one accosted them: "You're freshmen, aren't you? Don't you think we ought to be going into chapel? There's another lot of us over by the stairs, a crowd from Pearson's. My name is King, Sally King."
"I'm Barbara Leighton, and this is my roommate, Doris Dale."
"I'm Anita Herron," said the girl who had been addressed as Fuzz.
"I'm Theresa Isabel Newton Young," the tall girl recited, gravely. "Dubbed 'Tiny-for-Short' since yesterday at three p.m., on my arrival in Porter Hall."
"I've heard of you," Sally King said. "There's a good crowd in Porter."
Swiftly, in the wake of Sally King, they threaded the outskirts of the crowd.
"That's Janet Bland, the senior president," whispered Sally, impressively. "Under the picture, looking this way. She's in our house. Oh, do you know her?"
"She wrote me in the summer," Barbara answered, proudly acknowledging Janet Bland's smiling nod, "and last night she asked me to go with her to the freshman reception Saturday."
"Lucky girl!"
"Somebody named Evelyn Howe wrote me," said Tiny. "She is probably four feet eleven and nine-tenths, but she'll hunt me out and ask me to go with her; and I'll dissemble my feelings, and say, 'Yes, thank you,' and feel like a giraffe tied to a grasshopper."
"But it's nice of them," protested Sally. "They take a lot of pains to make freshmen feel at home here, writing you in the summer, and meeting your train and your car, and telling you all the things you want to know."
Out of the hush the organ spoke, and Barbara and Doris, and all the other two hundred odd freshmen, passed under the spell of their first chapel service.
It was not the deep-voiced organ, or the upward sweep of hundreds of young voices, or the president's good advice; it was what they all stood for - the life of a great community of girls - that caught Barbara by the throat, and sent prickles of excitement coursing up and down her spine. What was waiting for her here? What experiences? What understandings? What glimpses into things she had not dreamed? Round her were the girls with whom she was to work and play for four years. Which would they be, her friends? That girl with the glorious copper-colored hair two rows ahead? The jolly-looking one across the aisle? The endless "Tiny-for-Short"?
Knee to knee with Barbara sat Doris Dale, with the tears burning behind her eyes. What stirred Doris was the thought of the long procession of girls, stretching back into the far-away past, who had here studied and frolicked and dreamed, as she was going to do, girls whose torches had been kindled from the fire in that great hand that had held the flame within their reach. She would try to fall worthily into the line. Oh, how she would try to carry on the flame!
Outside, Doris found herself beside Anita Herron. "Do you know which Dwight Hall is?" she asked. "I don't."
"I haven't a notion. But I'm due there this minute. Let's find it together."
"Dwight?" A girl turned her head to inform them. "The stone building beyond the library."
How obliging every one was! More and more warmly Barbara and Doris echoed Sally King's sentiment. Whether you hunted for a class or a lost trunk, whether you needed glue, or a tack hammer, or bookcase curtains, or whether you were just hopelessly, tearfully homesick, the upper classes were ready to help you. They took you walking; they bought you college ices; they bestowed on you advice as to what could and what could not safely be done with college furniture, and how best to dispose chiffoniers in closets.
Neither Doris nor Barbara was homesick. Doris indeed had her sober half hours, when she knew very well that she had only to let herself go to become almost as moist as the tearfullest. But that she refused to be. She had a good many silent half hours, too, but they were not of the same kind as the sober ones. They were devoted to registering impressions, and Doris was almost always dumb when so engaged. The more impressions there were to be registered, the more silent she grew.
"Nobody just meeting you would dream how nice you are," Barbara said to her flatly, one afternoon. "You're so still."
"I know I'm still." Doris sighed. "I can't seem to see and talk, too. There's so much to be seen about strange girls."
"You talked to me that day at your house, and I was a strange girl."
"I'd heard a lot about you. And besides, I had to talk. There wasn't anybody else to talk to you."
As for Barbara, the lure of all she saw and heard bewitched her. Dormitory on dormitory, honeycombed with rooms! She and Doris made excursions to all of them. Through half-open doors they saw stepladders topped by hot, gym-suited workers, couches guiltless of covers, baskets and trunk trays spilling over with pillows and books and pictures. Through other doors, rooms, settled and serene, looked out at them.
What were they like, the girls at home in these hundreds of rooms? Barbara could not find out quickly enough. Laughter floating through the dusk, a whistled call dropping from a window to halt some passer on the walk below, flicked her spirit. She was impatient to be off from the threshold into the midst of the throbbing life round her.
"How long do you suppose it will take us to get into things?" she asked, as, standing behind Doris, she did her hair for the freshman reception.
"To get into things?" murmured Doris, rising on her tiptoes in an attempt to see herself more completely in the mirror.
"I feel so terribly new; as if I had just been put together, and hadn't quite discovered how I was made to run, and whether they hadn't given me too many hands and feet."
"Really?" said Doris. "Why, I didn't suppose you ever felt like that, Barbara."
"Don't tell anyone, if I don't show it. That tall Miss Martyn who was in here last night gives it to me the worst. Here, let me hook you up."
Doris backed up to her obediently. "She didn't seem quite polite, I thought, talking that way about her friend's brother. But she is certainly stunning."
Barbara, however, was determined to like every one. "It was polite of her to ask us to a party, wasn't it?"
"Yes, oh, yes, especially when it was only you she wanted."
"Nonsense!"
A knock fell on the door, and the girl across the hall came in. Until yesterday there had been two girls across the hall. Then one of them squeezed back into tow trunks her half unpacked possessions, sold the desk she had bought at the sale in the rink, and departed, vanquished by examinations.
"May I leave the door open a crack, so that I can see when she comes?" inquired the survivor, a stout girl in white poplin. "It's the leader of the Glee Club, they tell me. The leader of the Glee Club! I don't sing a note, and I hate things where you gabble and feed. But here I am going to one of them before I've been in this place four days! Tried to beg off, but they wouldn't let me."
"You'll like it," said Barbara.
"I shan't."
"But Florence -" Doris began. "May I call you Florence?"
"Glad to have you - till they give me a nickname. I'm hoping they'll do it soon. I'm hailed as Flossy at home!"
"I shall call you Wally," Doris announced.
Miss Walters put both hands on Doris's shoulders. "D. D.," she said, "I hereby promise to love you forever." Then she held Doris off at arm's length. "Pretty dress you've got on. Both dresses pretty." Retiring to the couch by the door, she sat down,a dn took her head in her hands. "Multiply two pretty dresses by - by - say, three hundred. Some dresses won't be pretty, and some girls will stay away, bless 'em. Me for white poplin!"
A step sounded in the hall, and after a preliminary survey through the crack, the fat girl departed. "See you later. After the show we'll compare notes."
They compared them strolling down from the village utility shop that evening.
"Bored to tears," "Wally" reported, succinctly. "Leader of the Glee CLub was all right. Deserves medal." She turned on Barbara. "Do you know now the names of one forty-seventh of the people who smirked at you this afternoon? Some of them forgot their own - almost. How can they expect me to remember them?"
"They don't," said Barbara. "But the faces come back to you, and with the faces some of the names. It seems as if every girl I met were either president or vice president of something, an editor or a captain, or a champion jumper. They didn't tell me, of course, but after they had moved on, somebody was sure to mention the fact."
A freshman in the group just behind them cried:
"Who do you suppose will be our officers? Who, for instance, will be our junior president?"
"It's much more to the point to think who will be our freshman class chairman," said Sally King.
"I guess that pretty Miss Berg in Rocky," the first voice announced.
"Whom do you guess, Jane?"
Jane did not know the Berg, but there was a girl in Brigham who would look the part, she volunteered.
"Does anybody know a girl named Young?" Barbara asked. "She lives in Porter."
"Tiny Young? Tiny-for-Short!" several voices cried.
Every one, it appeared, knew Tiny-for-Short.
"I guess her," said Barbara.
"Why don't you speak for yourself, John?"
A little rush of acclamation followed the question.
Barbara's heart lost a beat, and then pounded on harder than ever.