The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware by Annie Fellows Johnston

"Please, Miss Lewis, _please_ do," came in a chorus of pleading voices, as half a dozen Freshmen surrounded Betty in the lower hall, one snowy morning late in January. "I think you _might_ consent when we all want one so tremendously."

"Come on down, Mary Ware," called A.O., catching sight of a wondering face peering over the bannister, curious to see the cause of the commotion. "Come down here and help us beg Miss Lewis to be photographed. There's a man coming out from town this morning to take some snow scenes of the place, and we want her to pose for him. Sitting at the desk, you know, where she wrote her stories, with the editor's letter of acceptance in her hand. Some day when her fame is world-wide a picture of her wearing her first laurels will be worth a fortune."

"Oh, Betty! Have they really been accepted?" cried Mary, almost tumbling down the stairs in her excitement, and forgetting the respectful "Miss" with which she always prefaced her name when with the other girls.

Betty waved a letter which she had just received. "Yes, the editor took them both, and wants more -- a series of boarding-school stories. One of these girls heard me telling Miss Chilton about it," she added, laughing, "and to hear them you would think it is an event of national importance."

"It is to us," insisted A.O. "We are so proud to think it is _our_ teacher, our special favourite one, who's turned out to be a sure-enough author, and we aren't going to let you go until you promise to sit for a picture for us."

"Then I suppose I shall be forced to promise," said Betty, smiling down into the eager faces which surrounded her, and breaking away from the encircling arms which held her determinedly. It was good to feel that she had the ardent admiration of her pupils, though it was burdensome sometimes to contemplate that so many of them took her as a model.

"I'm going to write too, some day," she overheard one of them say as she made her laughing escape. "I'd rather be an author than anything else in the world. It's so nice to dash off a new book every year or so and have a fortune come rolling in, and everybody praising you and trying to make your acquaintance and begging for your autograph."

"It is not so easy as it sounds, Judith," Betty paused to say. "There's a long hard road to travel before one reaches such a mountain top as that. I've been at it for years, and I can only count that I've made a very small beginning of the journey."

Still, it seemed quite a good-sized achievement, when later in the morning she beckoned Mary into her room, and watched her eyes grow wide over the check which she showed her.

"One hundred dollars for just two short stories!" Mary exclaimed. "And you wrote most of them during Christmas vacation. Oh, Betty! How splendid!" Then she looked at her curiously. "How does it feel to be so successful at last, after being so bitterly disappointed?"

Betty, leaning forward against the desk, her chin in her hand, looked thoughtfully out of the window. Then after a pause she answered, "Glad and thankful -- a deep quiet sort of gladness like a bottomless well, and a queer, uplifted buoyant feeling as if I had been given wings, and could attempt anything. There's nothing in the world," she added slowly, as if talking to herself, "quite so sweet as the realization of one's ambitions. I was almost envious of Joyce when I saw her established in a studio, at last accomplishing the things she has always hoped to do. And it was the same way when I saw Eugenia so radiantly happy in the realizing of _her_ ambition, to make an ideal home for Stuart and her father and to be an ideal mother to little Patricia. In their eyes she is not only a perfect house-keeper, but an adorable home-maker.

"Lloyd, too, is having what she wanted this winter, the social triumph that godmother and Papa Jack coveted for her. Her ambition is to measure up to all their fond expectations, and to leave a Road of the Loving Heart in every one's memory. And she is certainly doing that. Her popularity is the kind that cannot be bought with lavish dinners and extravagant balls. She's just so winsome and dear and considerate of everybody that she's earned the right to be called the Queen of Hearts."

"And now all four of you are happy," remarked Mary, "for your dreams have come true. And seeing that makes me all the more determined to make mine come true."

"Oh, the valedictory that you are to win for Jack's sake," said Betty, coming out of the revery into which she had fallen for a moment.

"That's only one of the things," began Mary. "The others -- " Then she stopped, hesitating to put in words the future she foresaw for herself. Sometimes in the daylight it seemed presumptuous for her to aspire to such heights. It was only when she lay awake at night with the moonlight stealing into the room, that such a future seemed reasonable and sure.

Unknowing that the hesitation held a half-escaped confidence, Betty did not wait for her to go on, but held up the check, saying, "You know this is a partnership story, and you are to get another trip to New York out of it. Putting your shilling in the Christmas offering was a good investment for both of us. If you hadn't I never would have thought of the plot which your adventure suggested."

"But you've made your story so different from what actually happened, that I don't see how I can have any claim on it at all," said Mary. "It's just your sweet way of giving me Easter Vacation with Joyce."

"Indeed it is not," protested Betty. "Some day I'll follow out the whole train of suggestions for you, how your shilling made me think of an old rhyme, and that rhyme of something else, and so on, until the whole plot lay out before me. There isn't time now. It is almost your Latin period."