College students -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Juvenile fiction
"Do you write, Miss Brown? I wish I could. I'd like to try for some of
the prizes for short stories. Think of winning a thousand dollars for
one story! Wouldn't it be glorious? Then, there are some advertisement
prizes, too. One for five hundred dollars; think of that! I always cut
out every one I see, meaning to compete, but I never do. It isn't in my
line, you see. I'm going to major in mathematics."
Molly smiled that the dainty little creature should have chosen that
hated subject for her life's work.
"You say you saved the clippings about prizes?" she asked when they had
reached Madeleine's lodging.
"Oh, yes; I have them all in my room. Would you like to see some of
them? Tell the man to wait, and I'll bring them down."
Molly reached Queen's that night before the other girls, and hastening
to the student's lamp, she proceeded to look over the clippings.
One was from a leading woman's magazine; one from a magazine of short
stories; several from advertising firms--the best jingle about a stove
polish; the best catchy phrase about a laundry soap; the best
advertisement in verse or prose for a real estate company which had
purchased an entire mountain and was engaged in erecting numbers of
Swiss chalets for summer residents. The pictures of these pretty little
houses were very attractive. Many of them had poetical names. One of
them, called "The Chalet of the West Wind," occupied the centre of the
page. From its broad gallery could be seen a long vista of valley,
flanked by mountain ranges.
"What a charming place!" thought Molly, and that night she went to bed
with the "Chalet of the West Wind" so deeply photographed in her mind
that she almost felt as if she had been there herself. She could see it
perched on the side of the mountain, looking across the valley. It was
at the very edge of the forest. The picture showed that, and in her
imagination she scented the wild flowers that must grow at its feet in
the springtime. No doubt the west wind, which symbolized health and
happiness, fair weather and sunshine, blew softly through its open
casements and across its spacious galleries.
She went to sleep dreaming of the "Chalet of the West Wind," and in the
morning something throbbed in her pulses. It was a kind of muffled
pounding at first, like the beginning of a long distance call,
"lumpty-tum-tum; lumpty-tum-tum." But gradually a poem took shape in
her mind, and as the fragments came to her she wrote them down on scraps
of paper and hid them carefully in her desk.
CHAPTER VII.
THE GLEE CLUB CONCERT.
"If a cross-section could be made of this house, it would be rather
amusing," exclaimed Judy Kean. "In every room there would be one girl
buttoning up another girl."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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