And she went to bed and fell asleep, quite unaware of how much she _had_ accomplished; for unconsciously she had laid the foundation of a friendship which was to make happy the future of a lonely freshman and an equally lonely instructor. XI "Local Color" The third senior table had discovered a new amusement with which to enlighten the tedium of waiting while Maggie was in the kitchen foraging for food. The game was called "local color," in honor of Patty Wyatt's famous definition in English class, "Local color is that which makes a lie seem truthful." The object of the game was to see who could tell the biggest lie without being found out; and the one rule required that the victims be disillusionized before they left the table. Patty was the instigator, the champion player, and the final victim of the game. Baron Muenchhausen himself would have blushed at some of her creations, and her stories were told with such an air of ingenuous honesty that the most outrageous among them obtained credence. The game in its original conception may have been innocent enough, but the rule was not always as carefully observed as it should have been, and the most unaccountable scandals began to float about college. The president of "Christians" had been called up for cutting chapel. The shark of the class had flunked her ethics, and even failed to get through on the "re." Cathy Fair was an own cousin of Professor Hitchcock's, and called him "Tommy" to his face. These, and far worse, were becoming public property; and even personal fabrications in regard to the faculty, intended solely for undergraduate consumption, were reaching the ears of the faculty themselves. One day Patty dropped into an under-classman's room on some committee work, and she found the children, in the manner of their elders, regaling themselves on dainty bits of college gossip. "I heard the funniest thing about Professor Winters yesterday," piped up a sophomore. "Tell it to us. What was it?" cried a chorus of voices. "I'd like to hear something funny about Professor Winters; he's the solemnest-looking man I ever saw," remarked a freshman. "Well," resumed the sophomore, "it seems he was going to get married last week, and the invitations were all out, and the presents all there, when the bride came down with the mumps." "Really? How funny!" came in a chorus from the delighted auditors. "Yes--on both sides; and the clergyman had never had it, so the ceremony had to be postponed." Patty's blood froze. She recognized the tale. It was one of her own offspring, only shorn of its unessential adornments. "Where in the world did you hear any such absurd thing as that?" she demanded severely. "I heard Lucille Carter tell it at a fudge party up in Bonnie Connaught's room last night," answered the sophomore, stoutly, sure that the source was a reputable one.