Chapter 17: A Private Detective

In spite of the surface frivolity, there was in Polly a strong vein of common sense. Therefore, as she thought more and more deeply about the newspaper article she became convinced that great injustice had been done Clarissa. She was naturally puzzled, for the notes so unkindly quoted were certainly from the Kansas girl’s note-book. Only too well she remembered having read them herself, and having laughed at some of the hits. But how had the newspaper obtained them? Without having talked with Clarissa directly, without having had more than the whispered word at the party, she yet knew that the Kansas girl was not to blame. She began to set her wits at work. To solve the mystery she must turn private detective.

One Wednesday afternoon she dropped into the pleasant drawing-room at Fay House; “the most homelike place,” she often said, “this side of Atlanta.” Indeed, many other Radcliffe girls were in the habit of saying the same thing, only instead of Atlanta they named Pittsburg, or Topeka, or Kalamazoo, or, in short, the particular city or town which each called her home.

“The first month I was in Cambridge,” Polly had said to the President, “I was right smart homesick and miserable. I felt like I couldn’t stand it. But when I came in here, and saw you seated at the tea-table, beside the open fire, I felt like I were with my grandmother, and that this was a place where I could lay aside all my forlornness. You don’t mind my comparing you to my grandmother? I reckon it isn’t perfectly polite.”

But the widow of the great scientist, who was proud to admit her threescore years and ten, smiled with her accustomed grace, saying in reply:

“No, indeed, my dear, I am only complimented by the comparison.”

Nor was Polly the only one who felt the restful influence of the drawing-room at Fay House; the quaint old-fashioned room, with its oval ends, curving outward, with its dull green satiny wall-paper, and the old-time couch and easy-chairs covered in flowered crimson.

Girls who entered it for the first time were impressed by the dainty silver and china of the tea-table, and they would turn from the life-size portrait of Mrs. Agassiz between the windows to the majestic figure of the President herself presiding over the teacups, and neither picture nor living figure suffered by the comparison.

On this particular Wednesday afternoon, not so very long after the publication of the alleged lecture of Professor Z in the yellow journal, Polly, after paying her respects to Mrs. Agassiz, seated herself at the further side of the room. She did not linger as was her wont around the tea-table, for two distinguished guests had entered just behind her. One was a Frenchwoman, of international reputation, and the other a distinguished Englishman, making a study of our institutions. The former was accompanied by a well-known member of the Harvard Faculty, and the latter by two Bostonians whom he was visiting.

“Isn’t it just lovely,” said a little Freshman seated near Polly, “to see such great people? That’s what I like about Boston and Cambridge. You’re always meeting people who seem to belong in books.”