lways had a maid to wait on her, and
has never been obliged to pick up even her own stockings. She doesn't
know how to be neat, and probably I shouldn't, either, if I hadn't been
so carefully trained."

Then she would hang the rumpled skirts back in the wardrobe where they
belonged, rescue her overturned work-basket from some garment that
Ethelinda had carelessly thrown across it, and patiently straighten out
the confusion of books and papers on the table they shared in common.
Although there were no more frozen silences between them their
conversations were far from satisfactory. They were totally uncongenial.
But after the first week, that part of their relationship did not
affect Mary materially. She was too happily absorbed in the work and
play of school life, throwing herself into every recitation, every
excursion and every experience with a zest that left no time for
mourning over what might have been. At bed-time there was always her
shadow-chum to share the recollections of the day. One of her letters to
Joyce gave a description of the state of resignation to which she
finally attained.

"Think of it!" she wrote. "Me with my Puritan conscience and big bump of
order, and my r.m. calmly embroidering this Sabbath afternoon! Her
dressing table, her bed and the chairs look like rubbish heaps. Her
bed-room slippers in the middle of the floor this time of day make me
want to gnash my teeth. Really it is a disaster to live with some one
who scrambles her things in with yours all the time. The disorder gets
on my nerves some days till I want to scream. There are times when I
think I shall be obliged to rise up in my wrath like old Samson, and
smite her 'hip and thigh with a great slaughter.'

"In most things I have been able to 'compromise.' Margaret Elwood, one
of the Juniors, taught me that. She tried it with one of her
room-mates, now happily a back number. Margaret said this girl loved
cheap perfumes, for instance, and she herself loathed them. So she
filled all the drawers and wardrobes with those nasty camphor
moth-balls, which the r.m. couldn't endure, and when she protested,
Margaret offered a compromise. She would cut out the moth-balls, even at
the expense of having her clothes ruined, if the r.m. would swear off on
musk and the like.

"I tried that plan to break E. of keeping the light on when I was
sleepy. One night I lay awake until I couldn't stand it any longer, and
then began to hum in a low, droning