Ruth Fielding At College: or, The Missing Examination Papers

Ruth and Helen found the rooms they were to occupy rather different from those they had chummed in at Briarwood. In the first place, these rooms were smaller, and the furniture was very plain. As Jennie had warned them, there were only cots to sleep upon – very nice cots, it was true, and there was a heavy coverlet for each, to turn the cots into divans in the daytime.

"I tell you what we can do," Ruth suggested at the start. "Let's make one room the study, and both sleep in the other."

"Bully idea," agreed Helen.

They proceeded to do this, the result being a very plain sleeping room, indeed, but a well-furnished study. They had brought with them all the pennants and other keepsakes from Briarwood, and sofa pillows and cushions for the chairs, and innumerable pictures.

Before night the study looked as homelike as the old room had at the preparatory school. They had rugs, too, and one big lounging chair, purchased second-hand, that Heavy had, of course, occupied most of the afternoon.

"Well! I hope you've finished at last," sighed the fleshy girl when the warning bell for dinner rang. "I'm about tired out."

"You should be," agreed Ruth, commiseratingly. "You've helped so much."

"Advising is harder than moving furniture and tacking up pictures," proclaimed Jennie. "Brain-fag is the trouble with me and hunger."

"We admit the final symptom," said Helen. "But if your brain is ever fagged, Heavy, it will only be from thinking up new and touching menus. Come on, now, we're going to scramble into some fresh frocks. You go and do the same, Miss Lazybones."

CHAPTER VI

MISS CULLAM'S TROUBLE

Ruth and Helen were much more amply supplied with frocks of a somewhat dressy order than when they began a semester at Briarwood Hall. Their wardrobes here were well filled, and of course there was no supervision of what they wore as there had been at the preparatory school.

When they went downstairs to the dining-room with Jennie Stone, they found they had made no mistake in "putting their best foot forward," as Helen called it.

"My! I feel quite as though I were going to a party," Ruth confessed.

The girls rustled through the corridors and down the wide stairways, laughing and talking, many of the freshmen, it was evident, already having made friends.

"There's that girl," whispered Jennie Stone, suddenly.

"What girl?" asked Helen.

"Oh! the girl with all the luggage," laughed Ruth.

"Yes," said the fleshy girl. "What was her name?"

"Rebecca Frayne," said Ruth, who had a good memory.

She bowed to the rather over-dressed freshman. She saw that nobody was walking with Rebecca Frayne.

"I hope she sits at our table," Ruth added.

"Of course," Helen rejoined, with a smile, "Ruth has already spied somebody to be good to."

"Shucks!" said Jennie. "I don't think she'd make a particularly pleasant addition to our party."

"What does that matter?" demanded Helen, roguishly. "Ruth is always picking up the sore-eyed kittens."

"I think that is unkind," returned Ruth, shaking her head. "Maybe Miss Frayne is a very nice girl."

"I wonder what she's got in all those bags and the big trunk?" said Jennie. "I see she's wearing the same dress she traveled in."

"I wager she misses her maid," sighed Helen. "Can't dress without one, I s'pose."

But there were too many other girls to watch and to comment on for the trio to give much attention to Rebecca Frayne. Ruth, however, said, with a little laugh:

"I must feel some interest in her. Her initials are the same as mine."

"And her arrival certainly took the curse off yours, my dear," Jennie agreed. "Edie Phelps and her crowd were laying for you and no mistake."

"I wonder if we shouldn't eschew all slang now that we have come to Ardmore?" Helen suggested demurely.

"You set the example then, my lady!" cried Heavy.

Miss Comstock, the very severe looking senior, sat at the table at which the Briarwood trio of freshmen found their numbers; but Miss Frayne was at the housekeeper's table. There were ten or twelve girls at each table and throughout the meal a pleasant hum of voices filled the room.

Ruth and Helen, not to mention their fleshy chum, were soon at their ease with their neighbors; nor did Miss Comstock prove such a bugaboo as they feared. Although the senior was a particularly silent girl, she had a pleasant smile and was no wet blanket upon the enjoyment of the dinner. At least, she did not serve as a wet blanket upon Jennie Stone. The fleshy girl's appetite betrayed the fact that she had been stinted at noon, and that a diet of string beans was scarcely a satisfactory one.

As they left the dining-room and came out into the wide, well-lighted entrance hall of the house, a lady just entering bowed to Jennie Stone.

"There she is!" groaned the fleshy girl. "Caught in the act!"

"Who is she, Heavy?" demanded Helen, in an undertone.

"She looks nice," observed Ruth.

"Miss Cullam. She's the one that advised the string beans," declared Jennie out of the corner of her mouth. Then she added, most cordially: "Oh! how do you do! These are my two chums from Briarwood – Ruth Fielding and Helen Cameron. Miss Cullam, girls."

The teacher, who was rather elderly, but very brisk and neat, if not wholly attractive, approached smiling.

"You will meet me in mathematics, young ladies," she said, shaking hands with the two introduced freshmen. "And how are you to-night, Miss Stone? Have you stuck to your vegetable diet, as I advised?"

Heavy made her jolly, round face seem as long as possible, and groaned hollowly.

"Oh, Miss Cullam!" she said, "I believe I could have stuck to the diet, if – "

"Well, if what?" demanded the teacher.

"If the diet would only stick to me. But it doesn't. I ate pecks of string beans for lunch, and by the middle of the afternoon I felt like a castaway after two weeks upon a desert island."

"Nonsense, Miss Stone!" exclaimed the teacher, yet laughing too. Heavy was so ridiculous that it was impossible not to be amused. "You should practise abstinence. Really, you are the very fattest girl at Ardmore, I do believe."

"That sounds horrid!" declared Jennie with sudden vigor, and she did not look pleased.

"You may as well face the truth, my dear," said the mathematics teacher, eyeing the distressing curves of the fleshy girl without prejudice. "Here are upwards of a thousand girls – or will be when all have arrived and registered. And you will be locally famous."

"Oh, don't!" groaned Ruth.