“Nope.” Muriel shook a smiling head. “I’m going to choose the enchanted iceberg for a roommate and see what happens. Are you modest enough to believe that Jeremiah would allow me to supplant you as a roommate? Thank you a million times just the same.”
“That’s the way to talk. I never credited you with such reasoning power as you have just displayed, my dear Miss Harding.” Jerry smiled fatuously upon Muriel then transferred her smiles to Marjorie. “You don’t seem to have the least inkling of my deep regard for you. Bean,” she reproved.
“You see the way things are?” Marjorie turned to Miss Remson with a laughing gesture.
“Yes, I see.” The manager rose from her desk. “Pardon me, children. I had best go upstairs and notify Miss Monroe that her roommate has arrived.”
“Tell her she may expect me,” giggled Muriel. “You needn’t say much about me. I’ll astonish her by walking in on her presently with a special P. G. swagger. Nothing succeeds like nerve, you know.” Muriel’s velvety brown eyes were dancing with mischief.
“I’ll back you to win,” were Jerry’s encouraging words. “You have almost as much nerve as I have; perhaps more.”
“I wish I could believe you.” Muriel was blandly regretful.
“What a waste of good health to worry over that one, Beauty!” Leila pointed derisively at Muriel.
“I should say so,” Ronny agreed with teasing stress. “I’m sorry for the enchanted iceberg.”
Marjorie listened and laughed at the exchange of repartee. At the same time she wondered, if, after all, Muriel Harding might not prove to be the best possible roommate for the lovely, ungracious fairy-tale princess.
Warned by her chums that her pretty roommate was more than likely to prove frosty, Muriel went to Room 22, armed with her usual light-hearted insouciance, the best weapon she could have had in the circumstances. Far from being cast down by the chilly environment Doris’s haughty manner merely appealed to her keen sense of the ridiculous. She gaily named her the Ice Queen and their room the ice chest. “If I stayed in the ice chest too long I might catch cold,” she roguishly informed her chums, “but I’m never there more than five minutes at a time except to sleep.”
With the filling up of the campus houses with students and the formal opening of Hamilton College the Travelers found their work cut out for them. They spent countless hours in station duty, welcoming arriving freshmen. Feeling their responsibility as post graduates they tried earnestly to promote a spirit of sociability on the campus. These self-imposed duties, besides the effort to keep in touch with their personal campus friends, kept them constantly occupied.