Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/512

470 fourteen or so, as we girls are, it is different. Examinations are the most important things in the whole wide world, and we lie awake at night and think about them, and we know we are not going to pass, and a cold perspiration breaks out all over us. In the daytime we have headaches and our hearts act queer, and we forget all the things we thought we knew, and we make up our minds that if we do fail we will never, never, never go home to bring disgrace on our dear mothers and bow our fathers' white hairs with sorrow to the grave. Instead of going home we decide that we will stop eating and pine away and die, and then they'll grieve for us all their lives instead of sitting and looking at us with sorrowful reproach.

Some girls have all these symptoms every time, and others just have some of them. I had a few during this glad spring of which I write, but I did not feel entirely hopeless, for I was pretty sure of several things, rhetoric especially, and I thought perhaps I could cram on the others and get through. I had been devoting a great deal of time to literature and the study of life and human nature, and I suppose in one way Mabel and Maudie and Mabel Muriel and I had wasted many golden hours of our youth in our long talks about life and love and other vital subjects. Still, we all stood well in our classes, so we had moments of hope. But Kittie James had every symptom I have so graphically described. You remember Kittie James. It was her sister Josephine who married Mr. Morgan after Kittie arranged matters for them.

Well, as I said, Kittie had all the worst symptoms I have mentioned, and a lot more. She got so she could not eat, and she had to go to the Infirmary every morning for tonics, and they gave her raw eggs and things; but, alas! naught did any good. The beautiful girl was pining away before our anxious, loving eyes.

What I am going to say now may hurt Kittie's feelings if Sister Irmingarde reads this story aloud to the class, but the Literary Artist must write of Life as it is, when it isn't scenery, so I will say kindly but truthfully that Kittie was not a child of what Sister Edna would call "exceptional mental powers." She was a dear thing, and blond and pretty and cunning, and you could cuddle her just like a little kitten if you wanted to, and you 'most always did,—but she was not bright. Mabel Blossom used to say, "Let's go to Kittie's room to-night and rest our intellects after the arduous strain of the day." And we would, and it always did rest them. You can see from this what kind of a girl Kittie was. When we talked about Life she went to sleep, and woke up in time for the "spread" we had before we went to bed. For growing girls need nourishment, and Kittie almost always had jam and pickles and things in her room. Sometimes Kittie would be studying when we got there, but she always looked so glad and relieved to see us that it was really touching. Then we would settle down cozily, and do our hair new ways, and talk and reveal the innermost recesses of our natures to each other the way we usually did when we were together. Sometimes Kittie would let us try on her new clothes. She always had lots, and of course that was interesting too, though we try to keep our mental plane above such worldly follies. When the bell rang and we had to leave, we used to feel sorry sometimes that we had taken up so much of Kittie's time, but she said it didn't matter, and I guess it didn't. She said she hardly ever knew what was in the book, anyhow, and that all the time she was trying to read she was thinking of Josephine and her mother and father and of George, and the fun at the Country Club, and wishing she was home. She got dreadfully homesick every little while, and especially before examinations. She said all she knew at school she learned in class, and that she could remember things when people talked about them and recited them, but not when she got them from printed pages. This was indeed strange, and most different from me, for books are my delight, and I can recite whole paragraphs where the hero crushes her to his breast—the heroine, I mean; not Kittie James. It isn't that I commit it to memory, either. It is just that it lingers in my mind. But poor Kittie could not remember anything, so she was worrying dreadfully about the ex-