told her that Eleanor had said she was sure to be popular and prominent
at Harding.

"What nonsense!" she said, with a flash of scorn in her slumberous hazel
eyes. "How it spoils life to count up the chances like that! How it takes
the fun out of everything! The right way is to go ahead and enjoy
yourself, and work your prettiest, and take things when they come. They
always come--if you give them a little time," she added with a return of
her usual serenity.

So it was wholly a matter of chance that Madeline Ayres should have
succeeded in turning Helen Chase Adams into an athlete. Helen had come to
college with several very definite theories about life, most of which had
been shattered at the start. She had promptly revised her idea of a
college in conformity with what she found--and loved--at Harding. She had
decided, with some reluctance, that she had been mistaken in supposing
that all pretty girls were stupid. But she still believed that genius is
an infinite capacity for taking pains--laying no very stringent emphasis
on the "infinite"; and she was determined to prove the truth of that
bold, if somewhat elusive, assertion, at least to the extent of showing
that she, Helen Chase Adams, could make a thoroughgoing success of her
college course.

Success may mean anything. To Helen Adams it had meant, ever since the
day of the sophomore-freshman basket-ball game, the ability to write
something that would interest her classmates. It might be a song that
they would care to sing, or a little verse or a story that Miss Raymond
would read in her theme class, as she had Mary Brooks's version of the
Chapin house freshmen's letters home, and that the girls would listen to
and laugh over, and later discuss and compliment her upon. It was not