Girls' Dormitory Read Online Free PDF

get off at the main gate. But walking is cheaper. You take thirty cents a day, both ways, and it adds up."
    So they walked.
    Peggy knew very little about Helen Lee. The girl never talked about her parents and she was very quiet in the room. Helen was taking a business course, the final year, and she seemed to be very studious.
    "I'm going to be the best damned secretary in seven states," Helen often said. "The executive who gets me will have a real whiz on his hands."
    Peggy was tempted to tell her, in confidence, that her father could use a good girl in his office but she soon decided against that. At the dormitory she was known as a chic dresser from an average family and it was better to let things remain that way. If anybody knew she had ten thousand dollars in her checking account they would either be after her for her money or they would stay away from her as though she had the plague. She wanted neither to happen.
    Her father wrote once a week, short letters that told her nothing. One week he was going up to Canada to see about a job and the next week he had sent somebody else. She suspected, though for no particular reason, that he had found another woman and that he didn't want to leave her. She answered her father's letters, telling him that she liked the school, and promising to send along some pictures as soon as she took some.
    Frank wrote once, a long, rambling letter with kiss marks on the bottom. He hadn't realized what he had been doing that night at the house and would she please forgive him? It was only a little over three hundred miles from Churchill to Cooper and if she said everything was all right he would drive down some weekend and see her. She tore up his letter, deliberately destroying the address, and she never heard from him again.
    Several boys at Cooper tried to date her, nice boys, but she laughed and put them off. A lot of the girls couldn't understand her.
    "I'd go out with anything that wore pants," Marie Thatcher said.
    Marie was an ugly looking thing who wore strange looking glasses and walked with a waddle. She boarded at Mrs. Reid's and she ate twice as much as anybody else, favoring potatoes and meat and gobbling down all the dessert she could get her hands on.
    "She's a pig," Helen observed.
    Peggy refused to comment about Marie, other than to say she felt sorry for her, but she knew Helen expressed the view of most of the girls.
    "And that Cathy Barnes," Helen said. "Have you noticed how she dresses?"
    Cathy was the fashion-girl type, petite and with a slightly under-developed body, who dressed in black—black sweaters, black skirts, black dresses, black every-thing. She was crazy about the boys, wild over them, and she would throw her homework aside to go on a date for a coke. It was all a boy had to buy Cathy. For a coke and a smile he could have what he wanted.
    Most of the girls at Mrs. Reid's, however, were sincere about what they were trying to do. Nearly all of them were on strict budgets and a few of them had extra jobs in the soda fountains or the stores around the city. One of these girls was Evelyn Carter, who worked in the five and ten every chance she got, saved every dime that she could, and prayed that the dean wouldn't kick her out of Cooper.
    "The baby isn't due until May," she said, "and if it holds off the way the first one does sometimes I could get through my exams."
    The officials at the college thought Evelyn was married but all of the girls at Mrs. Reid's knew that she wasn't. She had met an artist during the summer at the lake resort where she worked, and she hadn't found out until it was too late that he was married and had two children.
    "If it wasn't for his religion he would divorce his wife," Evelyn stated firmly. "I know he would."
    "Sure," Helen agreed. "And if it wasn't because he'd bleed he'd cut his throat."
    That made Evelyn cry and she ran out of the room.
    "Damn men," Helen said later. "They get a girl that way and then they leave her. They ought