Girls who have not followed the adventures of Betty Wales and her friends during their freshman and sophomore years at Harding College may enjoy a bit of an introduction to the circle, before beginning the story of their doings as juniors. Jolly, happy-go-lucky Katherine Kittredge; Rachel Morrison, as steady and dependable as Katherine was volatile; shy, sensitive Roberta Lewis; Eleanor Watson, beautiful, but not a general favorite; forlorn little Helen Adams, and Betty Wales were freshmen together at Mrs. Chapin’s. Mary Brooks, the only sophomore in the house, did her best to make life a burden to them in the amusing but innocent fashion that hazing takes at Harding. The good times they all had together and Betty’s trials with Helen Adams, who fell to her lot as roommate, and with Eleanor Watson, whom she admired for her cleverness and over whom she managed to exert a strong influence for good, are recounted in “Betty Wales, Freshman.”
When they were sophomores most of the Chapin House girls moved to the campus, where they were distributed among the various college dwelling-houses, there to find new interests and make new friends. Chief among the latter was Madeline Ayres, the girl from “Bohemia, New York,” whose original and always artistic ideas for everything from political parades and vaudeville shows to the arrangement of a room and the soothing of an irate editor won her vast popularity. Another important addition was Dora Carlson—Eleanor Watson’s freshman she was called, from her dog-like devotion to Eleanor. Dora and Betty between them, with some help from Madeline and some from Miss Ferris, a friend on the college faculty, kept Eleanor from utterly ruining her career at Harding. A story not her own that she printed in the college magazine made no end of trouble for Eleanor and her friends, but in spite of that the sophomore year was a merry one. Indeed I think that Betty Wales and her set entered upon their junior year with the firm conviction that you couldn’t help having a good time at Harding—even if you tried.