“I wonder the thoughts do not poison the roots—­the idea of you saying a word against your hair!  Why, it’s simply wonderful!  Edna says it sings in the sunshine.”

“Oh, Ned pities me I suppose—­she has such a fine crop herself.  But I would—­love—­to—­be handsome!”

“Suppose you start in to drag down some of that stuff you insist on taking home, Tavia,” said Dorothy, indicating the decorations that hung on Tavia’s side of the room.  “Then it will be handsome is as——­”

“Handsome didn’t,” misquoted Tavia.  “I don’t mind dragging it down, but I have a mind to get some one to help me.  I might give out that we were having a ‘doings’ and so entice Ned Ebony, and a couple of the others.”

“You compendium of laziness!  You proverbial prolonger!  There, I have used up more energy in giving expression to those expressions——­”

“Than I should have used up in expressing the whole art gallery via the Amalgamated Express Company.  Now, Doro, I am going to give a dragging-down evening.  If you have anything you value, that might get in the drag, take notice,” and she left the room, to gather in the innocent victims of her plot.

Dorothy laughed.  She did love Tavia, and once more they were separating from the days and nights spent together at dear old Glenwood.  The girls had occupied room “nineteen” in spite of the fact that their advance in class entitled them to other quarters, but each loved the apartment, and they had “grown into it,” as Tavia remarked.

“I believe I had better rescue my things,” mused Dorothy, “for there is no telling where the dragging may end,” and, suiting her act to the words, she promptly put a pile of cushions on the highest chair, and began to take from her side of the room such trinkets as are inconceivably dear to the heart of every schoolgirl.

How differently her division of the room was decorated!  Tavia had actually drawn a line—­clothes line—­straight across the room, marking out the territory of each.  Dorothy had put up pictures, birds’ nests, flags and the home colors, while Tavia had revelled in collapsed footballs, moth-eaten slouch hats, shot through and through, and marked with all sorts of labels, of the college lad variety.  Then she had a broken bicycle wheel, in and out of which were laced her hair ribbons and neckties, this contrivance being resorted to in order to save the junk from the regulation pile—­it being thus marked as a useful article.  There were pictures, too, on Tavia’s side of the room, but how they got there one could never guess from a birds-eye view—­for the hanging indicated a sudden storm on “art day,” without paper-weights.  This same blow included the mottoes, and wise sayings; trophies of certain victories in the way of narrow escapes from dismissals, or such mementos as suspicious games outside the school grounds.

“No wonder Tavia wants help,” thought Dorothy, as she hurried to get her own things safely put in the box that stood ready.  “I declare, she has the queerest taste—­if such things are included in the taste faculty.”