more pathetic droop at the corners of her mouth, leaving the other with a fellow feeling for any unfortunate bull who happens to get into a china shop, intentionally or otherwise. Life at college promised to be like walking over exceedingly thin ice every day and all day long.

And yet, after she had learned to make allowances for the oversensitiveness, Bea found Lila more lovable and winning week by week. She was philosopher enough to recognize the fact that every one has the “defects of his qualities.” The very quality that sent Lila hurrying up-stairs in an agony of mortification because a senior had forgotten to bow to her, was the one that inclined her to enter into Bea’s varying moods with exquisite responsiveness. It was delightful to have a friend who was ever ready to answer gayety with gayety and sober thoughts with sympathy. Indeed, when Lila was not wrapped up in her own suffering, she could not be surpassed in the priceless gift of sympathy. For the sake of that, much might be forgiven.

Much but not everything. Just before the midyear examinations came a crisis in the growth of their friendship. One afternoon Lila reached the head of the stairs barely in time to make a sudden swerve out of Miss Merriam’s breezy path.

“Heigho, Eliza Allan,” she called in careless teasing, “why don’t you spell your name the way it is in the catalogue? More dignified, I think. By the way, I’ve been into your room and left some burned cork for your chapter play. We had more than we needed last night. By-bye.”

Lila walked on in frosty silence. By-bye, indeed! And to address her as Eliza, too, on this very afternoon when she had as much as she could bear anyhow. To hear her essay read aloud and criticised before the class, and then to have it handed to her across the desk, so that anybody could see the awful Rewrite in red ink scrawled on the outside! To be sure, all the essays had been distributed at the same time, and nobody knew for sure that hers had been the one read aloud. Still they might have seen the name on it or noticed how red and pale she turned, or something. And worse still, the examinations were coming soon, and she was sure she would fail. If it were not for leaving Bea, she would go home that night. She certainly would!

As she entered, Bea looked up brightly from the cardboard which she was cutting into squares.

“Here you are!” she exclaimed in cheery greeting, though her eyes had shadowed instantly at sight of the unhappy drooping of every line. “Sue Merriam has been in to show me how to make you up for the play next month. It takes quite an artistic touch to darken the brows and touch up the lashes. Catch these corks and put them away. They’re messing up my dinner-cards.”

Lila’s shoulders quivered as if pricked by a spur even while she mechanically caught the bits of black and fumbled them in her fingers.

“She meant that my brows are too thin and my lashes too light. I would thank her to keep her criticism until it is called for.”

For half a minute Bea kept her head down while her chest heaved over a sigh of weary anticipation. Then she turned with an affectionate query: “What has happened now, Lila? Tell me, dear.”

Upon hearing about the affair of the essay, she expostulated consolingly, “Of course that is no disgrace. She is severe with all the girls, tears their essays into strips and empties the red ink over them. She doesn’t mean it personally, you know. How can we learn anything if nobody corrects our mistakes? Anyway it was an honor to have it read aloud. Very likely the girls did not see the Rewrite. She never bothers much with the utterly hopeless papers. Come, cheer up! The red ink was a compliment.”

“Do you really think so?” Lila smiled a little doubtfully. “It sounds like one of the sophists—‘to make the worse appear the better reason.’ I’d love to believe it, and you are sweet to me.” She laid one arm caressingly across Bea’s shoulders. “It is queer that I don’t mind more when you scold me so outrageously.”

“Scold you?” repeated the other in amazement at such a description of her soothing speech.

Lila nodded. “I never stood it from anybody else. Maybe it is because you are my special dearest friend. That is why I came to college, you know. At home the girls disappointed me. There were several in the high school who might have been my friends if they had been different from what they were. Ena Brownell and I were inseparable for weeks till one morning she went off with another girl instead of waiting for me on the corner, though I had telephoned that I would meet her there. Even if I was a few minutes late, she would have waited if she had really cared. I cried myself to sleep every night for a long time but I never forgave her.”

“Um-m-m,” muttered Bea, her head again bent over the cardboard, “how horrid! See, isn’t this a lovely daisy I’m drawing? They’re to be dinner cards for my next spread. This is for your place.”

“It’s sweet. I think you are the most talented girl in the class.” Lila stooped for a hug but carefully so as not to interfere with the growth of the silvery petals. “There was another girl, and her name was Daisy. She seemed perfect till I discovered that she prized her own vanity more highly than my happiness. She refused to take gym work the third hour when I was obliged to have it. She said the shower bath spoiled the wave in her hair, and so she chose the sixth hour class. Yet she knew very well that I had Latin at that period. I don’t care for that selfish kind of friendship, do you?”

“Um-m, no!” Bea’s brush dropped an impatient splash of yellow in the heart of the flower. Then she glanced up with a penitent smile.

“You’re so awfully loyal yourself, Lila,” she said. “You try to measure everybody up to that standard. I shan’t forget that day in hygiene when you declined to answer the question that floored me. It was like that poem about the girl who wouldn’t spell a word that the boy had missed, because she hated to go above him. And at the tennis tournament you wouldn’t leave till I had finished the match, though you shivered and shook in the frosty October air. You do a lot for me, and I am downright ashamed sometimes. See, behold the completed posy!”

“It is too pretty for a mere dinner card.” Lila dropped into a rattan chair and idly tossed the corks from hand to hand. “Aren’t you planning a long time ahead? Your family knows exactly what to send in a box. That last was the most delicious thing! I suppose we’ll just ask our crowd of freshmen, Berta and Gertrude and the rest.”

Lila’s eyes were so intent upon the dancing corks that she failed to note the swift glance which Bea darted in her direction.

“Um-m-m,” she said cautiously, “I think I might like an upper class girl or two. Some of them have been awfully kind to me this year. Sue Merriam escorted me to the first Hall Play, and she proposed our names for Alpha, and on her birthday she asked me to sit at her table and meet some seniors as an invited guest. She said the “invited” with such a thump on it that my heart almost broke. Isn’t she the greatest tease?”

No answer.

“It was mostly due to her that I came to college,” continued Bea with an effort to speak naturally though her fingers shook the least bit in their grasp of the brush, and one anxious eye was watching Lila’s face. “I’ve known her all my life. She persuaded the family to send me, and she tutored me last summer and helped in