CHAPTER III

PARADES AND PARTIES


It was surprising how well the girl from Bohemia fitted into the life at
Harding. She had never experienced an examination or even a formal
recitation until the beginning of her freshman term. She had seldom lived
three months in any one place, and she had grown up absolutely without
reference to the rules and regulations and conventions that meant so much
to the majority of her fellow-students. But she did not find the
recitations frightful, nor the simple routine of life irksome. She was
willing to tell everybody who cared to listen what she had seen of French
pensions, Italian beggars, or Spanish bullfights. It astonished her to
find that her experiences were unique, because she had always accepted
them as comparatively commonplace; but her pity for the girls who had
never been east of Cape Cod nor west of Harding,--there were two of them
at the Belden,--was quite untinged with self-congratulation.

She was very much amused and not a little pleased, by her election to the
post of class secretary.

"They did it because I passed up four languages," she explained to Betty.
"Somehow it got around--I'm sure I never meant to boast of it--and they
seemed to think they ought to show their appreciation. Nice of them,
wasn't it? But I fancy I shan't have a large international
correspondence. It would have been more to the point if they'd found out