“Of course it is hard for her to keep her half of the room in order,” she would say to herself.  “She’s always 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 chant, sort of under my breath, like an exasperating mosquito:  ’Laugh-ing wa-ter! Big chief’s daugh-ter!’ till I nearly drove my own self distracted.  I could see her frown and change her position as if she were terribly annoyed, and after I had hummed it about a thousand times she asked, ’For heaven’s sake, Mary, is there anything that will induce you to stop singing that thing?  I can’t read a word.’