Doris had no false pride. She was not ashamed of caring for a girl who did not care much for her. She would not have liked to take the college into her confidence, but she found herself glad, after all, that Wally knew.
Had Doris looked for a return from Barbara of her affection, she would inevitably have been unhappy. "We sleep together," Barbara said once, when Frances Harrison asked her where Doris was. "Night is absolutely the only time when I can count on seeing my roommate."
"Don't you mean when she can count on seeing you?" Wally inquired.
"What's the difference?" asked Barbara.
Doris was not unhappy, because, for the present, at least, she was satisfied to do most of the caring. "I'm not Bab's kind," she said to herself. "If I hadn't roomed with her, I would never have known her - never!"
When she was alone in Number 64, and this thought came to her, she walked over to the picture of Miss Frayne, hanging above Barbara's desk.
"You did it!" she said to the clear, unsmiling eyes. "You gave me college and Barbara, too. Thank you."
Doris was always quite certain that then the eyes began to smile at her.
She liked to do little unobtrusive things for Barbara, things that Barbara could not possibly know had been done for her, that she must always suppose - if she thought about them at all - had merely happened. Nevertheless, Doris did not use a dust mop again for a full fortnight. Her affection did not seek outlet in fagging. On the contrary, it made her punctiliously careful to avoid what Wally had construed as "spoiling Bab."
Barbara was studying. She had been studying for almost a week now. The fact erased the worry from her little roommate's face, and smoothed the puckers out of her brain. It set her free to browse luxuriously at Wally's side in the library, to enjoy Frances' proximity with unharassed mind.
"Seems to me your roommate is getting mighty chummy with Frances Harrison lately," Nina Darling remarked to Barbara the afternoon before the "show." They were walking with Tiny-for-Short and Fuzz and Migs.
"Doris!"
"Didn't you know it?"
"Not that they were what you could call chummy," Barbara answered.
Fuzz laughed. "Where have your eyes been all this time, Bab?" she asked.
"Frances is in our room a lot," said Barbara, "but -"
Tiny-for-Short reached out a long arm and gathered Barbara under it. "Did you think she came to see you, Bobolink?"
"I hadn't thought anything about it, Tiny." Nina's information, which seemed familiar to every one else, had take Barbara by surprise, but there was no pique in her surprise. She laughed at her own ignorance. "They say you never see what goes on under your nose."
"I believe you," said Fuzz. "Name the triumvirate."
"Give it up."
"She doesn't know anything!" exclaimed Tiny.
"I wish Wally lived opposite me," said Nina. "She's the funniest thing here."
"Do you call Doris and Wally and Frances the triumvirate?" Barbara exclaimed.
"Good guesser!"
"That's the right word for me, Fuzz."
"Honestly, haven't you seen them together lately?"
"Honestly, no."
"You have not been very keen. Here's the florist's. Didn't somebody say Janet Bland is in the play to-night? Let's get some flowers to throw when she comes on the stage."
"Good head, Nina."
They trooped into the little shop, and from the abundance set before them selected red roses, the freshman flower, choosing each bud with care.
"We have to be very particular about them," little Migs said to the shopman.
That night, Barbara inspected her roommate curiously, if covertly, while they dressed for dinner. What was it that Frances Harrison and Wally saw in her? Wally was rapidly taking her place as one of the unique girls of the class; she had shown from the first a decided liking for Doris's society. As for Frances, her charm and beauty set her on high to be admired. Yet here she was, said to be taking leave of her pedestal to seek out Doris. "I suppose I did think she came to see me," Barbara admitted to herself. Aunt Annabel had seen something in Doris, too, and Aunt Annabel had been a discriminating person. Curiosity stirred in Barbara at this new evidence of her roommate's charm.
"It must be that I don't know her, in spite of the fact that I have the best chance. I wonder what she's really like?"
On impulse she said suddenly, "I wish you were going to sit with us to-night."
"My seat's not so bad," said Doris. "But it would be fun up there on the end of the gallery. Can you see, though? You'll be almost on top of the stage."
"Like a box. I'll tell you what we can see later. Watch out for something to happen to-night, Doris."
"What kind of a thing?"
"Oh, nothing much. We five have a plan, that's all. Don't speak of it, but keep your eyes open."
Doris and Tiny-for-Short and Fuzz and Migs and Nina attended the play in a body. They not only sat together, but they met in Tiny's room and went together, borne steadily on the current of one of the gayly-colored streams that from three directions set toward the gymnasium. Their slippered feet skipped a little as they walked, and their hearts beat high with excitement under their evening cloaks. Dinner had been a festive function, gay with expectancy and light dresses and the hurried slipping out of people who were "going rush." After dinner had come an interval of banter and song, followed by a flurried hunt for tickets.
It had been exciting to pass along a corridor behind a lovely violet thing, and see a shimmering pink or blue or pale green thing, leaning over the stairs, and promising to be "down in a minute"; to open doors on chiffon and messaline and mull, where ordinarily you found serge and flannel.
It was fun now to drift with the press to the gymnasium portico. Barbara and Tiny showed odd bulges under their opera cloaks, and had to manoeuvre skillfully in the crowd.
Beyond the swinging glass doors pretty ushers, with blue ribbon wands flitted busily.
The five submitted their tickets to inspection, and mounted the stairs. To trail along the gallery in their prettiest clothes, past girls they knew and girls they did not know, also in their prettiest clothes, gave them supreme contentment. To settle themselves just behind the chain that stretched across the end of the running track where the section in front of the stage had been drawn up - to show the florist's boxes, cause of those mysterious bulges, out of sight against the wall, but handy to Mig's fingers - to turn and survey the house - that was their procedure.
And such a house! Waves of color washed over rows and rows of seats, breaking in the foam of freshmen in last summer's graduation white. Men and faculty and older guests were inundated in that sea of girls; at first glance you failed to notice their presence. The voice of the sea surged ceaselessly in your ears, a soft din of talk and laughter.
Could this be the gymnasium of every day, where they played basketball, and swung Indian clubs? By and by, familiar faces swam out of the rainbow sea below. The five craned their necks and chattered.
"There's Eunice Berg!" Barbara cried. "And Sally King is sitting next to her."
"See Delight Lane, who wrote the play, in the second row. I wonder how she's feeling about now?"
"She looks cool."
"What did we tell you this afternoon, Bab? There's your roommate."
"Farther aisle, right, eight rows back. Between Wally and Frances Harrison."
Speculatively, Barbara eyed the three under the opposite gallery. "I wonder?" she thought. "I wonder? I mean to know."
But now a plaintively indignant voice assailed her ears. "Who said Janet Bland was in this play?"
"Of course she's in it, Migs."
"Her name's not down."
"You're crazy."
"Look for yourselves."
"Perhaps she's on the committee."
"Her name's not there, either."
"That's funny. Sally King said they hadn't seen anything of Janet Bland for a week over in Pearson's because she was so busy about this play."
"They why isn't her name down on the programme?"
"If she isn't in it, after all we've gone and done -" began Fuzz.
"We can't help it now," Barbara said. "Let's encore the orchestra. They're working hard."
"Here comes Ednah Rodney. She wrote all the music, you know. Now it will begin."
Soon the curtain rose; Barbara and Tiny-for-Short and Fuzz and Migs and Nina gazed breathless, almost perpendicularly above the footlight at the extreme left. "Topsy-Turvy" caught them from the start with its color, and dash, and fun. Its choruses demanded the accompaniment of their feet; its nonsense and humor set them gasping, and laughing, and wondering all at once.
What was that? A strike? A strike among the faculty for less pay and more hours of work? And with the help of their subjects they were going to picket library, laboratories and lecture rooms, in order to prevent the girls from going in to work! Why there was Miss Chemistry Ford mounted on the senior steps and haranguing - but no, it could not be she. Just before the curtain went up Miss Chemistry Ford, in a white cloth dress, had been sitting in the second row of chairs on the floor. But how could anyone who was not born a twin make herself look so much like anyone else Even if little Miss Chemistry Ford had a double, had anyone ever seen the registrar's double before? Yet there she was, tall and stately, dealing out bright red cards to some of your very own instructors, who kept shouting that they wanted to be examined at once for "the army of revolt."
But now the little girl who looked exactly like Miss Chemistry Ford began to sing a song. "They don't give us enough to do! They don't give us enough to do!" Over and over the refrain snapped out spiritedly. How dared they make fun of the faculty like this?
But even funnier than the faculty in their new rôles were the pickets when they came running in, led by Herodotus and an isosceles spherical triangle. There were a German dictionary, and a couple of test tubes, and a prehistoric bird track, a punch bag that everybody punched when there was nothing else to do, a cat's skeleton, a tall, slim Indian club, and one short and fat, a dinosaur, and an elocution machine that wound up by a handle, and piped, "She sells sea shells," and instructions to speak "from the diaphragm."
The picket chorus had to go back and sing their first two stanzas all over again because the audience had drowned them out.
After that there was nothing for the students to do except to petition the governor to order out the militia. And then, when the real faculty, looking on, were shaking with appreciative enjoyment, when the upper classes were openly rapturous, and the freshmen were comprehending enough of the jokes to be happy, a tall, broad-shouldered young officer, with a mirthful blue eye and an expressive mouth, strode on the stage. The officer had a very personable figure, and rested a hand lightly on his sword hilt, but it was his eyes and mouth that particularly appealed to the audience. They spoke as eloquently as did his tongue, and much more often.
The curtain fell on the first act. The applause rose in rattling volleys, swelled and ebbed, and swelled again.
The curtain quivered.
Migs fumbled at the wall. "Quick!" she gasped. "Let's throw them now! Janet Bland isn't in it. Let's throw them, anyway. Oh, quick - quick!"
The roses, fluttering from the hands of the excited five, fell barely across the footlights.
Under their eyes, "Captain Dick" stepped forward, gathered up a handful of flowers, and bestowed on the five a deliberate wink of his good right eye; then he turned, and with a bow presented the roses to Miss Chemistry Ford, who as spiritedly pressed them back on him. Down came the curtain.
The lights blazed up, and immediately the hall burst into a flare of animated talk.
"Oh, isn't it great!" said Tiny-for-Short.
"It is!" cried Migs. "Oh, that captain!"
"Those eyes!" sighed Barbara.
"And the mouth!" added Fuzz. "The way she twists her lip!"
"He, you mean," Tiny corrected.
"It's the eyes," persisted Barbara. "He talks with them."
"It's everything," said Nina. "And to think I room right over Captain Dick! Never again will I creak my rocker above that head."
"Wouldn't you expect Delight Lane to burst?" inquired Tiny. "See the people come up and speak to her. But she hasn't yet - not once. I've been watching."
"I should hope not," said Nina.
"I wish the faculty really would strike," said Fuzz. "Wouldn't it be a lark!"
Barbara, in the midst of the talk, was all the while dreamily intent on something else. Now she knew what she had to do in college. Whatever else she did, she would act. Other girls might be league presidents, and lead glee clubs, and edit things; other girls might have the pretty dresses. Barbara was going in for dramatics.
In the course of the second act Barbara's gaze ranged aloft, and remained for a few moments fixed on the rafters above the stage. Then she communicated her discovery to the others, and five pairs of eyes repeatedly strayed vertically upward from the stage. On the stage the trial of the cat's skeleton was in progress. The cat's skeleton had picketed unlawfully, it was asserted by the prosecution, in lifting up its voice against certain students entering the zoölogical laboratory, thereby scaring them "nearly into fits." A loud mew proceeding from a bag of bones, the defense held, was clearly not covered by the statutes.
The trial was being conducted in a dimming light, when the cat on the stage suddenly picked up its bones and danced. It was a very little dance at first. A delicate, light-stepping affair, deliberate, and graceful, and grave. This skeleton did not look much bigger than the laboratory skeletons, but it showed up well from all over the house. Its bones gleamed white in the dusk of the stage. Gradually they began to move faster, to whirl in wilder and wilder contortions. The audience was on its feet, cheering, beating its hands together, laughing. Round and round sped the cat, jumping into the air, tossing up its leg bones, chasing the vertebræ of its tail in delirious frenzy. And then - snap! The stage sank into blackness, the cat collapsed into a little heap of bones, and when the footlights flashed out again, there was no cat anywhere to be seen. The judge declared the indictment quashed.
All the spectators agreed that Captain Dick and the skeleton cat were the hits of the evening. They had them back after the last curtain, and the cat bobbed its bony head, and lifted its bony tail, and flirted its bony legs, and floated modestly off at the wings before the audience was half ready to see it go.
"Author! Author!"
"We want Delight Lane and Ednah Rodney! We want Delight Lane and Ednah Rodney!"
After that, most people thought that it was time to go home. Not so the five in the gallery. They helped each other reluctantly into their evening cloaks, and sighed because it was all over. They would have liked it to last all night. Slowly, at the rear of the crowd, they drifted toward the stairs.
"How soon do they let you try for parts in a play here?" Tiny inquired.
"I don't know," said Migs.
"Not until you're a sophomore, and only then if your work is up," volunteered a girl ahead.
Tiny thanked her, and addressed the other four. "Who meets me next year at the trials?"
"I'm no good at that sort of thing," said Fuzz.
"It looks easy," Migs said, "but what looks easy isn't always as easy as it looks."
"Hear! Hear!" cried Nina. "I'd make a good bear in an animal play. I'd growl, and - hug you!" She wheeled on Fuzz, who retreated with a squeal. "There! You see how lifelike I'd be. Can't think of any other part I could play, though."
"I'm with you, Tiny," said Barbara.
"Knew you would be, Leighton."
At the top of the staircase Migs looked back. Cloaked figures were descending the steps that led into the gymnasium from the doors at left and right of the stage.
"Hurry, girls!" begged Migs. "Hurry, and maybe we can get down in time to see the cast come out."
At the foot of the stairs the five slipped through the trophy room and across a window seat into the gymnasium. An odd procession straggled toward them down the hall: imitation faculty, animated gymnasium apparatus, khaki soldiers, undergraduate types, each accompanied by friends carrying guns, caps, hats, and boxes of flowers. And there was Captain Dick. His military cape swung free. Beside him was Janet Bland, buttoning a raincoat over her gymnasium suit.
"Wasn't she splendid?" Janet Bland was saying. "Wasn't she a whole show in herself?"
"I?" said the captain, gayly. "Who made the cat dance? Who jiggled that bag of bones till people couldn't see straight for laughing? That was a show, all right."
"But nobody knew it was you!" Barbara cried. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.
"I should hope not!" said Janet Bland. "If everybody could see the strings, where would be the illusion?"
"Want me to beau you home, old bone-rattler?" asked the captain.
"No, indeed! You're tired enough now. And I promised to wait for Edith. There she comes."
Captain Dick drew his cape closer. "Good night, everybody. Don't wake me early, any mother's daughter of you!"
"We could see you," Barbara said to Janet Bland, "from where we sat, but I've heard ever so many girls saying, 'How in the world did they make the cat go? It looked as if it went of itself.'"
"Good! That is what we wanted them to think."
"But you did it! Don't you want them to know you did it?"
"I don't care. The cat danced. That's the main point. Edith, Edith, hurry up!"
"Dorry," Barbara said, as they undressed together fifteen minutes later, "how much could you see of the skeleton cat's antics?"
"Why, everything, Bab," Doris replied. "We saw everything. Wally nearly laughed herself sick."
"Could you see who did it - who made it go?"
"No, not a thing."
"Did you hear anybody say who did it?"
"No. They were all shouting when it happened, and afterward they said how clever, and that there must have been strings to it and somebody above somewhere to work them, and that it went better even than last year."
"No names?"
"No."
"There were strings," said Barbara. "Janet Bland worked them, in her gymnasium suit on a beam."
"Janet Bland! Did she?" There was a thrill in Doris's voice.
Barbara turned, with her hairbrush in her hand. "You feel that way, too?"
"I think it was splendid of her."
"She doesn't. She thinks it was just the natural thing to do."
"She would," said Doris.
"We bought the roses for her, and then we threw them to Captain Dick. It makes me sick."
Doris finished her braid in speechless sympathy.
"Do you know how Janet Bland makes me feel?" pursued Barbara. "She makes me feel as if I were about the bigness of an ant. That girl is what I call worth while."
The two were in bed before either spoke again. Then Barbara, moved by the stress of the evening, in the safe immunity of darkness and of Doris's understanding silence, spoke: "I've learned a lesson to-night. I guess I needed it bad enough. It isn't who does the thing or anybody's knowing that you did it that amtters. It's getting it done right."