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THE SCIENCE OF A N IM A L W EL FA R E
The Science of Animal Welfare

Understanding What Animals Want
Marian Stamp Dawkins

Department of Zoology
University of Oxford, UK
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Marian Stamp Dawkins 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949499
ISBN: 978–0–19–884898–1 (hbk.)
978–0–19–884899–8 (pbk.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848981.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
The welfare of animals must depend on an understanding of animals and one does
not come by that understanding intuitively: it must be learned.
P. B. Medawar (1972) The Hope of Progress
I would like to thank Jonathan Kingdon for allowing me to use part of one of his
paintings for the cover of this book. The full painting shows the red eye and striking
plumage of a male vulturine guinea fowl as a female might see him, with the margins
suggesting how adult plumage derives from juvenile camouflage.
Preface
I wrote this book for two reasons. One was to clarify what is meant by animal welfare in
a way that would be accessible to anyone, whatever their views on animals and whether
they are scientists or non-scientists. The other was to put an animal’s point of view at the
centre of how we assess their welfare.
The book is not intended either as a textbook or as a campaigning book. It is more a
guide for anyone who is interested in animals and how their welfare can best be assessed
scientifically. There are full references to the scientific literature so I hope that it will be
useful to scientists and to students, particularly in biology and veterinary medicine, but
I also hope that it is self-contained enough to be clear to everyone else, whatever their
background or previous knowledge. My aim is to show how science can be used to
discover what is best for animal welfare, but to do so in a way that leaves it up to each
individual reader to decide for themselves how the facts we have discovered should be
used to change, or not change, the way animals are treated.
I would like to thank numerous colleagues for discussions that have helped in the
writing of this book, including Christine Nicol, Sabine Gebhardt-Henrich and Edmund
Rolls. Conversations with David Wood-Gush are still vividly remembered.
One small point. I have used the term ‘animal’ throughout the book to mean ‘non-
human animal’. Of course we humans are animals too, but to keep saying ‘non-human’ gets
tedious after a while and makes sentences clumsy. So please take the term ‘animal’ as a
convenient shorthand, not as a statement about our wider relationship to the rest of the
animal kingdom.
M.S.D.
Oxford
October 2020
1
Animal Welfare: The Science
and Its Words
If you are human, you cannot help being touched in some way by the other animals that
share this planet with us. Even if you are unaware of them, they affect your health, the
food you eat, the medicines you take. And if you interact with them in any way, you will
know how profoundly animals can also affect our lives as companions, pests and sources
of great wonder and beauty.
The welfare of different species—and no-one knows exactly how many of them there
are—is of increasing importance to many people. In response to rising public concern,
the past 40 years has seen an unprecedented growth in laws and regulations to protect
animals and, more positively, to give them better lives.
However, if these laws and regulations are really to achieve their aim of improving the
lives of animals, they need to be evidence-based—that is, based on what can actually
be shown to improve animal welfare rather than on what well-meaning people imagine
might improve it. Different animal species are different—different from us and different
from each other. We all share the same needs for basics such as nutrition and shelter, but
there are vast differences in how these needs are met because of our differences in
lifestyle, environment and genetics. These differences need to be researched and under-
stood if good welfare and quality of life are to be achieved for all species.
That is where the science of animal welfare comes in. It is a science dedicated to pro-
viding an evidence-based approach to animal welfare. But it is a science with some
rather peculiar problems of its own, arising partly out of its subject matter (what is
animal welfare?) and partly out of its frequent use of emotionally laden words such as
‘suffering’, ‘fear’ and ‘stress’ that carry with them built-in views about what is good or
bad. Unlike, say, geology, which can be defined as the study of the Earth and its rocks
without expressing any opinion about what ought to be done about either the Earth
or its rocks, animal welfare science is deeply enmeshed in the power of its own words.
The word ‘welfare’ itself expresses the view that achieving good welfare is a desirable
aim, and calling an animal ‘fearful’, ‘frustrated’ or even just ‘restricted’ presupposes
the conclusion that what is happening to the animal must be bad for it and should be
stopped. Just think of the difference that is implied by describing an animal as ‘calm’ and
describing that same animal as ‘inactive’ or ‘inert’ and you can see the power of words to
The Science of Animal Welfare: Understanding What Animals Want. Marian Stamp Dawkins, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Marian Stamp Dawkins. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848981.003.0001
2 The Science of Animal Welfare
completely alter our view of a situation and give a very different steer as to what ought
to be done about it.
So the words we use to describe animals and their welfare are not neutral. They come
loaded with emotional overtones of what is good or bad. They are full of their own impli-
cations of what ought to be done and subtly encourage the kind of thinking (all too easy
to slip into anyway) that bypasses careful consideration of what is actually happening
and what scientific evidence we need to gather.
This book is an attempt to cut through the words and unclear definitions that often
confuse thinking about animal welfare and to lay out a truly scientific, animal-centred
way of defining good welfare. We will see that it is possible to define animal welfare in an
objective way that can be easily applied and understood (Chapters 2 and 3) and to use
this definition to evaluate the different kinds of information we now have to make evi-
dence-based decisions about how to improve it (Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7). The thread
running through the book is the importance of taking into account what animals them-
selves want, so that welfare is viewed not just from a human perspective but from the
animal’s point of view too.
Making what animals want the very heart of what ‘welfare’ is allows us to bring
together many years of research by many people and to show how apparently different
ideas fit together. As we will see, it also allows us to resolve many of the controversies that
have arisen about what are valid or invalid measures of welfare. In that sense, the book
sets out to be a straightforward look at animal welfare science today.
There is another sense, however, in which it which it departs quite radically from
some current definitions, particularly those that define animal welfare primarily in terms
of conscious experience. For the reasons explained in Chapter 2, the definition of ‘ani-
mal welfare’ we will be using rests entirely on what we can actually observe and measure
in practice—that is, on how animals behave and their physiology. It does not mention, at
least in the first instance, sentience or what animals are consciously feeling. Defining
welfare without consciousness does not, of course, deny animal sentience or imply that
animals lack conscious experiences. It simply means—temporarily—leaving the issue to
one side on the grounds that consciousness is itself so difficult to study that including it
in the definition of welfare only leads to confusion and controversy. In fact, as we will
see in Chapter 2, one of the main reasons why there is currently no generally agreed
definition of welfare is because there is no generally agreed definition of consciousness.
A definition of welfare that does not mention conscious feelings can therefore be thought
of as an intellectual safety device, a way of avoiding being distracted by terms that are
difficult to define or emotionally loaded. Using this device, we can arrive safely at test-
able, objective hypotheses about what animal welfare is and how it could be improved.
Then, in Chapter 8, we throw off the safety harness and look at what we now know about
animal sentience and its role in animal welfare.
First, however, we need to look at the biggest of all word problems that animal welfare
science faces—a definition of what welfare is.
2
What Is Animal Welfare?
Fifty years ago there was no recognized science of animal welfare. There was just a
collection of vets, ethologists, geneticists and other people scattered around the world
who were linked by the belief that animal welfare was important and deserved to be
taken seriously as a science in its own right. With such diverse starting points, a single
definition of ‘welfare’ was unlikely to emerge easily.
What is more surprising is that now, with animal welfare science an established dis-
cipline, with its own journals and textbooks and international societies, there is still no
agreed definition of ‘welfare’ or a consensus on how to improve it (Green and Mellor
2011; Ede et al. 2019; Weary and Robbins 2019; Polgár et al. 2019). Some people, for
example, argue is that the only way to guarantee the welfare of an animal is to make its
environment as ‘natural’ as possible, whereas others will claim that a natural life does not
guarantee good welfare and that animals’ needs can be better met in a controlled, if arti-
ficial, environment. Each side here is using a different definition of ‘welfare’, different
methods for assessing it and coming up with a completely different answer as a result.
About the only thing that commands a measure of universal agreement is that welfare
is very complex and that assessing it requires evidence from many different sources
(Mason and Mendl 1993; Fraser 2008; Mellor 2016a). But from a practical point of
view, this is clearly not good enough. For something as important to many people as
animal welfare, and certainly for trying to make improvements to the lives of animals, we
need to know what welfare is, not just that it is difficult to define.
We therefore start our exploration of animal welfare (or ‘well-being’ as it is sometimes
called) by trying to say exactly what it is we are talking about. Furthermore, this needs
to be done in terms that everyone—farmers, vets, politicians, philosophers, scientists and
the general public—can all understand and buy into. Animal welfare may now be a sci-
entific discipline but it is one that touches the rest of the world very directly. People
everywhere therefore want access to the important advances that are being made in
understanding the worlds of animals.
In this chapter, we will see that there are two main reasons why people disagree about
what the term ‘animal welfare’ should mean. One is the multiplicity of different ways that
are now used to measure ‘welfare’, including physiology, health, hormone levels, behav-
iour, immunology and choice tests, which may all give conflicting answers. This leaves
people unable to agree on which ones to rely on and which ones deserve top priority in
the definition of ‘good welfare’. The other is the widespread desire to put subjective
The Science of Animal Welfare: Understanding What Animals Want. Marian Stamp Dawkins, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Marian Stamp Dawkins. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848981.003.0002
experiences—that is, the way animals consciously experience pain, pleasure and suffer-
ing—at the core of the definition. Consciousness, however, is difficult enough to study in
humans and even more so in other species, which means that making conscious feelings
an essential part of the definition of welfare has inevitably lead to controversy. We
can refer to these two issues as the complexity problem and the consciousness problem,
respectively. Neither need prove fatal to a universally agreed view of what good welfare
is, but before we can arrive at an agreed definition of animal welfare, we need to deal
with each of them in turn.
The complexity problem

Animal welfare does not lack ‘measures’ of welfare. Among the many ways of measuring
welfare that have been proposed we find: longevity, surface injuries, immune function,
increase in activity, decrease in activity, H-index (a measure of behavioural diversity),
sleep, play, stereotypies, exploration, response to novel objects, approach distance to
humans, choice, grooming of self, grooming of others, telomere length, skin tempera-
ture, eye temperature, hormone levels, pupil size, cognitive bias, time to build a nest and
running speed. There are many more. The problem is not too few measures of welfare
but how to make sense of the many that are available and which ones can be most reli-
ably used to define good welfare.
Early on in the development of animal welfare science, the first attempts to measure
animal welfare acknowledged that this was indeed a very complex problem and that the
best approach was to make as many different measures as possible and hope that a com-
posite picture would somehow emerge (Dawkins 1980; Broom and Johnson 1993). This
was a bit like being unable to get into a room but looking in through many different
windows, as Jane Goodall (1990) put it. The different windows were things like measur-
ing stress hormones, weighing adrenal glands, looking for unusual behaviour, assessing
the animal’s health and so on. It was soon realized, however, that these different meas-
ures did not always show the same thing (Mason and Mendl 1991) and that what seemed
to be going on in the room depended on which window you looked through. For example,
animals might show a rise in corticosteroid hormone (sometimes called ‘stress’ hor-
mone) not just when they were in an obviously stressful situation such as being chased
by a predator but also when they were anticipating food, having sex or given access to a
preferred environment (Rushen 1991).
A widely adopted solution of how to deal with such ‘contradictory’ measures is to
make as many different measurements as possible and then take a balanced consensus
view of all of them. For example, Welfare Quality® (2009, 2018), a European-wide pro-
ject with the ambitious aim of defining welfare for different farmed species, involves a
series of detailed protocols for assessing four key welfare area of good housing, good
feeding, good health and appropriate behaviour. For each area there are 50 or more
measurements, which are then combined into a final score of ‘excellent’, ‘enhanced’,
‘acceptable’ or ‘not classified’ (Buijs et al. 2017). Welfare is thus defined as the weighted
sum of its many component parts. Of course, the final answer depends critically on how
What is animal welfare? 5
much weight is given to each component, so the issue of how to combine or reconcile the
different measures does not go away. The room still looks different depending on which
window you look through most often.
So the first requirement for a universal definition of animal welfare is that it must
somehow be able to accommodate the wide variety of different ways that people now
have of measuring welfare. It must also justify the priority given to these different meas-
ures in arriving at the final combined answer of what good welfare actually is. But before
we can do that, we have to deal with an even greater problem that has also got in the
way of a universally agreed definition of animal welfare—the issue of what animals
consciously feel.
The consciousness problem

The belief that non-human animals have the capacity to consciously feel pain and pleas-
ure (often referred to as ‘sentience’) is what for many people distinguishes animal wel-
fare from, say, the care of plants or the curation of valuable works of art (Singer 1976;
Midgley 1983; Rollin 1989). The central importance of sentience in shaping attitudes to
animals is often traced back to Jeremy Bentham’s (1789) famous statement about dogs
and horses: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suf-
fer?’ More recently, Singer (1976) and other philosophers have argued that sentience—
particularly the capacity to suffer—should be the deciding factor in our concern for
animals, and many biologists have also argued for defining welfare in terms of what
animals consciously feel (Dawkins 1990; Duncan 1993; Webster 1994; Fraser 2008;
Broom 2014; Mellor 2019). Across the world sentience is now used as the basis of ani-
mal welfare legislation, a notable example being the European Union’s (2009) Lisbon
Treaty, which explicitly states that animals are sentient beings. Many people take the
view that it is so obvious that non-human species consciously experience feelings of
pleasure, pain and suffering that the same mixture of intuition, guesswork and a willing-
ness to give the benefit of the doubt that we use to conclude that other people are con-
scious can be used, suitably adjusted for biological differences, to conclude the same for
other species as well (e.g. Panksepp 1998, 2011; Balcombe 2006; Bekoff 2007; Urquiza-
Haas and Kotrschal 2015).
But this growing assumption of sentience in other animals only makes it more diffi-
cult to agree on a definition of animal welfare that suits everyone. Consciousness is the
most elusive and difficult to study of all biological phenomena (Koch 2004; Blackmore
and Troscianko 2018). Even with our own consciousness, we still do not understand
how the lump of nervous tissue that makes up our brain gives rise to private subjective
experiences—such as a pain that hurts us, a feeling of cold that is unpleasant or a sensa-
tion of seeing a red light that feels like anything at all. And because we do not understand
how the human brain makes us conscious, we do not know what to look for in other
species to decide if they, too, have conscious experiences like us. Perhaps they do, but
how would we know? And what if the ‘feelings’ of a fish were so different from those of
a dog that we would find it difficult to bring them into the same definition?
The past 20 years have seen an explosion of interest in trying to solve what has come
to be known as the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995) and there are now
a number of widely held theories about how it might be possible to recognize when a
human brain switches from unconscious to conscious processing, which we will discuss
more fully in Chapter 8. We have brain imaging techniques that effectively show us what
is going on inside a living, thinking brain and a far greater knowledge than ever before
about what different parts of the brain are doing as we go about different tasks, recall
memories and slip in and out of consciousness. All this new information should have
made it easier to determine which other species have conscious experiences more or less
like ours. It would seem obvious that the better we understand what brain mechanisms
make us conscious, the better equipped we would be to judge whether other species have
similar mechanisms, but in fact just the opposite seems to have happened.
Depending on which theory of consciousness you choose to believe, it is now possible
find an extraordinary range of conclusions being drawn about which animals are con-
scious. At one extreme, we find claims that almost all of them are, to, at the other, that
none of them are. Proposals for membership of the ‘consciousness club’ include that it
is for humans only (Macphail 1987), for language users only (Rosenthal 1993, 2005),
for humans and apes only (Bermond 2001), for all mammals (Boly et al. 2013), for
mammals and birds (Seth et al. 2005), for mammals, birds and reptiles but not fish or
amphibia (Cabanac et al. 2009), for all vertebrates including fish (Denton et al. 2009;
Mashour and Alkire 2013; Braithwaite 2010; Sneddon 2019), for all vertebrates and a
few invertebrates such as octopuses (Tye 2017), for many invertebrates especially insects
and crustacea (Barron and Klein 2016; Bronfman and Ginsberg 2016) or that it should
be for all living things, including plants (Margulis 2001). It has even been claimed that
consciousness is everywhere, even in inanimate objects (Chalmers 2016; Kastrup 2018).
This lack of agreement among scientists about animal consciousness or even which
animals are capable of having conscious feelings at all leaves the study of animal welfare
at risk of looking vague, unscientific and unable to agree on its own core concept. Seeing
what appears to be the inability of animal welfare science to understand animal con-
sciousness, people outside the scientific community feel entitled to argue that their views
are as good as anyone else’s, including, perhaps particularly, those of scientists. The
problem of how to understand what animals feel arouses strong and divergent opinions
well outside animal welfare science itself. As a consequence, ‘animal welfare’ has come to
means very different things to different people, united by the belief that it is about what
animals feel but divided by how and even whether this can be studied scientifically.
Since finding a universally agreed definition of animal welfare has been made so dif-
ficult by the widespread desire to define it largely, if not exclusively, in terms of what
animals feel, some animal welfare scientists have started to think that the best way to
make progress is to use a definition that does not depend on conscious feelings at all
(Arlinghaus et al. 2009; Würbel 2009; Dawkins 2012). This view does not deny con-
sciousness to animals. On the contrary, it allows for the strong possibility that many of
them do have vivid conscious experiences, perhaps very like our own, a possibility that
we will discuss further in Chapter 8. All it says is that, for now, we need a definition of
animal welfare that everyone, whatever their views on animal consciousness, can agree
on. A possible way forward, therefore, is to define animal welfare without any mention
of consciousness, sentience or subjective experiences whatsoever. In that way, everyone
is free to have their own views about consciousness in other species, but consciousness
does not form part of the definition of animal welfare itself. This has the important con-
sequence that we do not have to have solved the hard problem of consciousness—the
hardest problem in the whole of biology—before we can have a scientific study of animal
welfare. Animal welfare without consciousness allows for the possibility of consciousness
in other species but avoids the confusion and controversies that are created by trying to
put conscious feelings into the definition itself (Dawkins 2015, 2017).
The two main reasons, then, why it has been so difficult to arrive at a definition of
‘good welfare’ that everyone can agree on are the complexity problem (so many different
measures of welfare) and the consciousness problem (subjective feelings). We will now
see that there is a relatively simple definition of animal welfare that can provide solutions
to both of these problems and at the same time gives a solid framework for a scientifically
based science of animal welfare. This definition has the ability to make sense of the many
different ‘measures’ of welfare that are now in use and also avoids (while not denying)
the possibility that animals have conscious experiences. It has the further advantage that
it is very simple and so can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike.
A basic definition of animal welfare

‘Welfare’ means literally ‘going well’ (it has the same two components as ‘farewell’). In
nature, success is measured in terms of survival and producing offspring, so an animal
that is ‘going well’ is one that is not just alive now but is on course for still being alive in
the future, at least for long enough to reproduce and pass its successful traits on to the
next generation. The essence of good welfare is therefore being currently healthy and
also having good prospects for future health. In that simple sentence lies the key to defin-
ing animal welfare.
Let us start with current health, which is universally accepted as the foundation of
good animal welfare. For example, the Five Freedoms (Brambell 1965; Webster 1994), a
widely used system for assessing welfare around the world, lists freedom from disease
and injury as a key indicator of welfare. This is emphasized just as strongly in more
recent versions such as the Ten General Principles (OIE 2012; Fraser et al. 2013), the
Five Provisions or Domains (Mellor 2016a, 2016b) and the Four Principles put forward
by the European Welfare Quality assessment (Welfare Quality® 2009). At least half of
the criteria put forward by these and other welfare schemes are specifically aimed at
maintaining animal health—such as making sure that animals have adequate food and
water, and are kept in safe comfortable environments in which they are not injured. So
there is no controversy over the importance of the current state of an animal’s health to
its welfare. We can, in line with all current thinking, list good health as the first part of the
definition of animal welfare.
Indeed, many of the most outstanding welfare issues are regarded as serious precisely
because they involve obvious physical injury and ill-health (Arlinghaus et al. 2009;
Würbel 2009; Dawkins 2012). For example, feather-pecking in laying hens (Gunnarsson
et al. 1999) and tail-biting in pigs (Taylor et al. 2012) can lead to serious injury and even
death. Death, injury and disease are clear health outcomes that can be measured in
objective, scientific ways and so using them brings ‘welfare’ easily into the realm of
scientific measurement and hypothesis testing.
However, most people would also argue that there is more to good welfare than just
physical health and so, while current health status is important, it cannot, on its own,
fully define welfare. Physical health tells us how well an animal’s body is functioning now
and perhaps about its likely health prospects for the future. It does not tell us how the
animal itself is responding to the world around it, whether, for example, it is searching
for something it cannot find (deprivation) or attempting to escape from something it
cannot avoid. In other words, physical health alone does not give us the animal’s own
point of view (Dawkins 1990). It does not tell us what the animal itself wants.
‘What the animal wants’ is the second key component of a definition of animal wel-
fare. Although it may sound a rather odd way of putting it, on closer examination ‘what
animals want’ actually puts into understandable words what most people mean when
they talk about good welfare. For example, if someone expresses concern about an ani-
mal kept in a zoo on the grounds that it is not free to carry out its natural behaviour, what
they really mean is that the animal is unable to do many of the behaviours it wants to do
and would do if it could. Or, if they describe a bird fluttering against the bars of its cage
as ‘suffering’, what they mean is that here is a bird that wants to escape. Describing these
situations in terms of what animals want (or do not want) avoids the pitfalls of using
words like ‘deprived’, ‘suffering’ and so on that describe situations as we humans might
see them. It asks the animals how they see things and points us clearly to how we can find
out, as we will see in Chapter 4.
Using the very down-to-earth phrase ‘what animals want’ also helps us deal with the
two problems with defining animal welfare that we discussed earlier in this chapter. It
helps with the complexity problem because finding out what the animals themselves
want allows us to validate a whole range of measures such as hormone levels, skin
temperature or activity levels that, on their own, are difficult to interpret in welfare
terms (Boissy et al. 2007; Dawkins 2008; Mendl et al. 2010). Finding out what the
animals themselves want allows us to categorize these in terms of whether the animal
regards a given situation as positive (to be approached and repeated) or negative (to be
avoided). This positive–negative categorization is sometimes called ‘valence’ (Mendl et al.
2010) and, as we will see in the following chapters, is key to the correct interpretation
of the different measures of welfare that have been proposed. Many questions, such
as whether animals should be able to do all their natural behaviour or what level of
stress hormone indicates poor welfare, immediately become much more tractable, once
they are subjected to the test of what the animal itself wants. Positive valence is key to
good welfare.
‘What animals want’ also provides a way of dealing with the consciousness problem
that makes it so difficult for people with different views on animal sentience to agree on
a definition of welfare. By being animal-centred but at the same time not making any
assumptions, one way or the other, about conscious experiences in animals, it provides
punishment arousal
high reward
avoidance
acquisition
system
system
fearful
excited
anxious
happy
Q4 Q1
–ve +ve valence
sad Q3 Q2
depressed relaxed
calm
low
Figure 2.1 How to put a variety of emotions into one diagram. The ‘core affect’ representation describes
each emotion in two dimensions - valence (whether it is positive or negative) and intensity (how strong it
is). The right half of the diagram shows positive emotions, associated with what is pleasurable or reward-
ing, while the left half shows negative emotions, associated with what is aversive or punishing. The core
affect was originally developed to describe human emotions but is increasingly used in animal welfare
science to describe emotions in animals. (Redrawn from Mendl et al. 2010).
a unifying definition that most people can subscribe to. The value of this approach can best
be illustrated by showing how ‘what animals want’ relates to one of the most important
recent developments in animal welfare science, namely, the use of the ‘affective state’
framework (Mendl et al. 2010; Anderson and Adolphs 2014).
‘Affective state’ is a concept originally developed for describing human emotions
(Russell and Barrett 1999; Russell 2003) and involves classifying all emotions along two
dimensions: valence and arousal (Figure 2.1). Valence, as we have seen, refers to whether
an emotion is positive or negative, so happiness and pleasure would have positive valence,
while fear, anxiety and boredom would have negative valence (Figure 2.1). Arousal, on
the other hand, indicates how strongly that emotion is felt—its intensity—and so can be
a feature of either positive or negative emotions.
As applied to humans, affective state explicitly includes subjective feelings as part of
the description of an emotion, so a positive emotion would be one that is consciously
experienced as pleasurable, while a negative emotion such as fear or anger would be
consciously experienced as aversive or unpleasant. However, in the human literature, it
is also fully recognized that all emotions—positive and negative—have three separate
components—the behavioural expression of that emotion, the physiological changes
that occur, and the subjective feelings that may or may not accompany that behaviour
and physiology (Keltner et al. 2013; Oatley and Jenkins 1996). Usually, of course, all
three components occur together. When we get angry, we start shouting (behaviour),
become red in the face (physiology) and feel furious (conscious experience). When we
become fearful, we prepare to escape (behaviour), our hearts start racing (physiology)
and we experience fear (subjective experience). But these components do not always go
together and the conscious experience of an emotion can be, and often is, dissociated
from the behavioural and physiological changes that normally accompany it. For
example, fear-reducing drugs that alter the way people behave do not necessarily make
them subjectively feel any less fearful (Le Doux 2014). People on such medication
can appear calmer on the outside and even show a reduction in heart rate and other
physiological indicators of fear but they still say they feel as anxious and fearful as ever
(Le Doux and Hofmann 2018). This appears to be because, in humans, there are two
separate brain circuits involved in fear: one involving the amygdala that controls the
behavioural and physiological response to threats, and a completely separate cortical
circuit that underlies the conscious experience of fear. Conscious feelings of fear do not
require the amygdala (Anderson and Phelps 2002), and medication that targets the
amygdala does not necessarily relieve subjective feelings of fear (LeDoux and Pine 2016;
LeDoux and Hofmann 2018).
But difficult though it is to make the distinction between the behavioural, physio-
logical and subjective components of emotion in humans, when it comes to applying the
same ideas to non-human animals, the distinction is often lost altogether. Very confus-
ingly, different researchers differ on whether or not they are talking about conscious
feelings. For example, Mendl et al. (2010) carefully say that the concepts of affect, emo-
tion and mood do not imply anything, one way or the other, about conscious feelings
when transferred to animals. They write: ‘Of course, even if we can use measurable
components of emotional responses to locate an animal’s position in core affect space,
we cannot be certain that they experience the conscious components too.’ They then go
on to describe animal emotions as states that ‘may or may not be experienced con-
sciously’ (p. 2896).
On the other hand, Ede et al. (2019) begin a recent review of cattle welfare by saying
‘we use the words “affect”, “emotion” and “feeling” synonymously’, thus implying that
for them ‘affective state’ does imply conscious feelings. Many papers on animal welfare
use words such as ‘emotion’, ‘optimism’, ‘pessimism’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ in ways that
also blur the distinction between observable behaviour and private subjective feeling,
leaving the reader unclear whether conscious feelings are or are not implied. Even with
disclaimers, the words that are used still carry with them the message of conscious
experience because in everyday language, that is the message they are used to convey
(LeDoux 2014).
The ambiguity about conscious feelings that is, often quite inadvertently, introduced
into discussions of animal welfare by the use of the affective state language can be easily
overcome by substituting ‘having what it wants’ for an animal with positive affect and
‘not having what it wants’ or ‘having what it does not want’ for negative affect. ‘Valence’
is directly equivalent to ‘what the animal wants’, but ‘valence’ too can be used in different
ways, so tends to increase rather than to reduce ambiguity. Whereas Mendl et al. (2010)
say that valence does not necessarily imply any subjective experiences, Webb et al. (2019)
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president, vice-president, and Students’ Council member may sit, or
even lean, on the note-room table.
The note-room is always crowded between classes, and on this first
disorganized, rainy morning it was a favorite rendezvous. As Betty
and Georgia wormed a slow passage through the crowd near the
door, they could see Miss Marie O’Toole, dressed, quite without
regard for the weather, in a furbelowed silk gown, a huge be-
flowered hat, and—of all things at Harding!—gloves, perched
comfortably on the sacred table, between Fluffy Dutton and a clever
little sophomore named Susanna Hart. Fluffy was all smiles and
attention; Susanna’s black eyes twinkled with suppressed glee.
Around the table surged a mob of girls, all amused but the
freshmen, who were deeply and seriously interested in what was
going on.
“Yes, I think I shall like it here,” Marie was saying in her sweet,
piercing voice. “It’s so friendly and informal—not a bit like Miss
Mallon’s Select School ‘pour les Americaines’ in dear old Paree. I’ve
talked to lots of nice girls this morning. I can’t remember half their
names, but they nearly all promised to call on me. You will too,
won’t you?” She beamed impartially on Fluffy and Susanna.
“Maybe, if we have time. Got a crush yet?” inquired Fluffy sweetly.
“A what?” Marie’s face was blank.
Fluffy explained.
Marie giggled consciously. “You embarrass me, Miss Dutton. You go
off and stand in a corner of the hall for a minute, and I’ll tell the rest
of these girls whether I’ve got a crush or not,—and what her name
is.”
Fluffy slipped obediently off the table, and then pulled the amazed
Marie roughly after her. “Freshmen aren’t allowed on this table,” she
announced sternly. “You’d better go home and read the rules of this
college. There’s a rule about crushes, too. And about asking upper-
class girls to call.” Then tender-hearted Fluffy relented and held out
her hand. “I must go now,” she said. “But it won’t be against the
rules for me to call on you, and I will. Where do you live?”
Marie explained, her gaiety somewhat subdued. Just then she
caught sight of Betty and Georgia, who had at last succeeded in
getting somewhere near the sacred table.
“Oh, Miss Wales,” she cried eagerly. “Here I am, and I need your
help right away. Where can I find a set of the college rules—about
calls, and crushes, and sitting on tables like this one, and so on?”
“And passing exams in freshman math.,” murmured Fluffy wickedly,
hazarding a guess that Marie’s brain was not of the exact, scientific
variety. “How do you do, Betty? I’m coming to the Tally-ho for tea
and a talk to-night—Straight too. You’ll be there?”
Betty said yes, trying to look properly reproachful and not
succeeding at all. Meanwhile the crowd had drawn back, old girls
having whispered to the gaping freshmen that Miss Wales was a
“near-faculty.”
“Shall we come over to my office?” Betty suggested, nodding right
and left to girls she recognized. Marie covered her silken elegance
with a natty white polo coat, and thoughtfully insisted on carrying
the umbrella over Betty on the way back to her office.
“Just look at that, Miss Wales,” she began, as soon as they were
seated, handing Betty a printed list of the accepted freshman
candidates. “I’m in. I wouldn’t believe it till I saw it down in black
and white. And I’m the only O in a class of two hundred. Isn’t that
funny, Miss Wales?”
Betty looked sympathetically at the name of the only O in the
freshman class. There it was, down in black and white: Montana
Marie O’Toole.
“Oh, how f——” began Betty, who was fast being overwhelmed by
the accumulating absurdities of her protégée. “Why, I—I thought
Marie was your first name.”
Marie giggled. “I’m always called Marie—now. Ma would be awfully
mad if she saw that ridiculous old Montana cropping out again. But
they told us, when I took my first exams, to put down our full
names. I asked if ‘M. Marie’ wouldn’t do, and the teacher in charge
of the room just glared at me; so of course I wrote it all out in full
about as quick as I could. You see, Miss Wales, I was born in a
mining camp, and Pa named me after the claim where he’d struck it
rich the very day I came into the world. The Montana Mary it was
called. When I went to Salt Lake to school I dropped the Montana,
and when I went to Paris I changed Mary to Marie. Marie suits me
better, don’t you think so, Miss Wales?”
Marie got up to shed her heavy polo coat, and stood, a dazzlingly
pretty vision, smiling down at Betty with the half-pleading, half-
commanding curve of her lips that made her so winning in spite of
her crudities.
Betty smiled back at her. “You’ll be Montana Marie as long as you
stay here,” she told her freshman. “So you’d better make up your
mind to it. The girls always seize upon a queer name and use it. If
you’d written just Marie, you might have been nicknamed something
funny; so it would come to the same thing in the end. Now may I
tell you a few things, please?”
Betty repeated sister Nan’s suggestions to her when she was a
freshman about not making friends too hastily. Then she arranged
hours for special lessons, helped Marie with her schedule of classes,
answered her frank queries about the desirability of being friends
with Georgia Ames and Fluffy Dutton. Then she rushed off to settle
the complicated case of Mary Jones, who lived at the other end of
High Street, ate a hasty luncheon, held a lengthy conference with
the Morton Hall matron, who had not the least idea how to hurry
through her business, made a friendly call on “the Thorn,” a student
who had given some trouble the last year, and whose mother had
died during the summer. And finally Betty turned up, fresh and
smiling, at the Tally-ho in time to take Emily’s place at the desk,
while that young lady combined a marketing expedition with a drive
behind Mary’s new thoroughbred.
At five Fluffy and Straight appeared and ordered tea at a table
drawn sociably near to Betty’s desk.
“Please notice our senior dignity,” observed Straight. “We’re not
going to be so harum-scarum any longer.”
“I noticed Fluffy’s senior dignity this morning,” Betty told them with a
twinkle.
The two exchanged significant glances and then made a
simultaneous rush for Betty’s desk, which they leaned over sociably,
in the unmistakable attitude of those having confidential information
to discuss.
“Please tell us if her name is really Montana Marie,” began Straight
abruptly.
“And how you happen to have her under your wing,” added Fluffy.
“And then we promise to be very nice to her,” concluded Straight.
“Besides, Fluffy says that she likes her.”
“We’ll be very nice to her anyway, if you want us to, Betty,” Fluffy
explained sweetly. “But we’re just bursting to know about her and
her beautiful name.”
“Just can’t put our minds on anything else,” murmured Straight
sadly. “And I can’t afford to risk a mess of warnings this year after all
the trouble I had with logic when I was a junior.”
“In short,” concluded Fluffy impressively, “Montana Marie O’Toole is
the sensation of the hour at Harding College. Do you ask me to
prove it? Watch the Dutton twins forget their cakes and tea while
they talk about her.”
CHAPTER III
THE INITIATION OF MONTANA MARIE
Montana Marie O’Toole was, even as Fluffy Dutton had said, the
sensation of the hour at Harding College. Indeed, she bid fair to be
the chief sensation of the entire year of 19—. Her cheerful interest in
the curious rites and customs of college life continued undiminished,
in spite of elaborate snubs from upper-class girls and the crushing
scorn of her fellow freshmen, who attempted, all in vain, to keep
Marie (and so Marie’s class) out of the public eye. Nothing escaped
Montana Marie’s smiling scrutiny. Her questions were frank and to
the point. Her pithy comments were quoted from end to end of the
Harding campus, and beyond. But her giggle was contagious, her
sweetness really appealing, her appreciation of any small favors
touching in its breezy Western sincerity. Montana Marie had “done”
New York and the European capitals; she had been “finished” in
“dear old Paree”; but she had also been born and brought up in a
Montana mining camp, and she was not ashamed of that fact, nor of
her very plain, as well as very peculiar, parentage. So Harding
College agreed with Fluffy Dutton in liking Montana Marie. Its laugh
at her was always friendly, if merciless, and in time it came to be
even rather admiring. But that was not until long after the initiation
of Montana Marie.
Susanna Hart planned that joyous festivity. Since Madeline Ayres had
planned a similar one for Georgia and the Dutton twins and some of
their Belden House classmates, and Betty Wales had explained and
defended the Harding variety of initiation to an amused faculty
investigating committee, there had been no official opposition to the
hazing of freshmen at Harding. Hazing (Harding brand) was
recognized as just an ingenious, “stunty” way of entertaining the
newcomers, of finding out their best points, of helping them to show
the stuff they were made of, and to take their proper places in the
little college world,—in short, of getting acquainted without loss of
time, or any foolish fuss and feathers.
So being initiated had speedily come to be considered an honor
instead of a torment. All the most popular freshmen were initiated—
in very small and select parties calculated to give each individual her
due importance. And because of the extreme popularity—or
prominence—of Montana Marie O’Toole, Susanna Hart decided that
she should have an initiation all to herself. So she asked Marie to
dinner at the Belden on a rainy Saturday night when there was
nothing else going on. The initiation feature of the evening’s
entertainment was not mentioned to Montana Marie; it was to be
sprung upon her as a pleasant little after-dinner surprise. Susanna
and her sophomore and senior friends in the Belden spent the whole
afternoon arranging the “mise en scène” for the mystic ceremonies;
and they made so much noise tacking up curtains and building a
spring-board in Susanna’s big closet that Straight Dutton, who had a
bad headache and was trying to sleep it off, came up-stairs, with
rage in her heart, to find out what was happening.
Fluffy, who was acting as Susanna’s chief assistant, explained. “We
thought you were asleep, so we didn’t come to tell you,” she ended.
Straight sniffed indignantly. “I was likely to be asleep—underneath
this carpenter shop.”
“Stay and help us, and drown your sorrows in fudge and——”
“Noise,” finished Straight crisply. “No, thanks. I’m going to ask
Eugenia Ford to massage my forehead. She’s wonderful at it. Tell me
what everything is for, and then I’ll go back.”
Fluffy gleefully exhibited a glove full of wet sand which Montana
Marie was to be induced to shake in the dark, as she entered the
dusky Chamber of Horrors, otherwise Susanna’s single. There was a
part of a real skeleton to run into; there were clammy things and hot
things and wriggly things to touch; and finally there was the spring-
board to fall from, down upon a heap of pillows, surrounded by a
bewildering, fluttering hedge composed of Susanna’s generous
wardrobe, carefully spread out on all Susanna’s dress-hangers, and
those of some friends.
“She’ll never get out of that closet until we haul her out,” concluded
Fluffy joyously. “Isn’t it going to be an extra-special initiation,
Straight?”
Straight nodded in silence, reëxamined all the arrangements with
polite attention to details, and departed, wearing the pained
expression appropriate to one with a bad headache.
Five minutes later she was sitting cross-legged on Eugenia Ford’s
couch, her cheeks still pale, but her eyes dancing with mirth and
excitement.
“Of course I’m a loyal senior, and I ought by rights to be up-stairs
with Fluffy helping the sophs,” she outlined her position rapidly. “But
they’ve got enough help without me, and the racket did bother me
fearfully, and made me mad, and besides, the juniors’ Rescue party
that I’m going to organize will be a grand feature, so they really
ought to thank me for seeming to bother them. How many juniors
are there in the house, Eugenia? Well, Timmy Wentworth counts
against two of the sophs, because she’s so big, and that big corner
double room she and Sallie Wright have is the very best place in the
house for our extra-special show. Now where can we borrow masks
and black dominos? I have an idea that raw oysters dipped in hot
chocolate sauce would taste rather weird. They never have had
uncanny eats at the initiations I’ve been to, so that will be an
original stroke. You go tell the others and buy the oysters and
borrow chocolate and find the clothes and get the night watchman
to lend you a lot of rope. I’ll take a nice little nap here on your
couch, away from that sophomore racket, and at five we all round
up in Timmy’s room to arrange.”
Having thus relieved herself of all minor details, after a fashion
taught her by her good friend Madeline Ayres, Straight curled up
among Eugenia’s downy pillows, and slept sweetly and very soundly
until Eugenia and Timmy Wentworth shook her awake with the
information that there were not enough black dominos and it was
quarter past five.
The Belden House juniors appeared at dinner that night late and
rather disheveled. Straight, because she had a headache, did not
appear at all, and thereby missed seeing Montana Marie sweep
through the Belden House parlors between the triumphant Susanna
and Fluffy Dutton, the latter not too much worried about her twin’s
unprecedented indisposition to miss any of the humors of the
situation. For Susanna and her friends, being rather tired and
hurried, and wishing also to be suitably clothed for darkling
adventures in Susanna’s closet, had not dressed very formally for
dinner. Against their background of shirt-waists and walking skirts or
plain little muslins, Montana Marie sparkled radiantly in a clinging,
trailing yellow satin, cut low enough to show the lovely curves of her
throat and long enough to give just a glimpse of her high-heeled
gold slippers and to lend her a quite sumptuous dignity among her
short-skirted companions. A jeweled fillet held her piled-up hair in
the exaggerated mode of the moment—it was becoming to Montana
Marie. Diamonds sparkled at her throat and on her fingers. In short,
Montana Marie was perfectly dressed for twenty-two and a formal
dinner,—but not for a school-girl nor for any little after-dinner
surprise in the way of an extra-special initiation party.
“It would be tragic to have to jump off a spring-board in those
clothes,” Fluffy whispered sadly to a sophomore neighbor. “We’ll
have to manage somehow to dress her over for the part.”
“She’s about my size; she can take my white linen with the braided
trimming,” the sophomore agreed magnanimously. “It’s rather dirty,
I’m sorry to say, but that’s really an advantage for to-night.”
“I’ll tell Susanna,” promised Fluffy, “and she’ll have to arrange. Why
in the world didn’t she tell Miss Montana Marie O’Toole not to dress
up like a princess?”
But Susanna, though she employed all her far-famed diplomacy,
could not “arrange” any changes in her guest’s wonderful toilette.
When she proposed a little walk in the rain, and said it would be a
shame to risk spoiling that lovely dress, Montana Marie only smiled,
and picked up her train.
“I shan’t spoil it,” she said. “I never spoil my clothes. But I’d love a
walk in the rain—with you and Fluffy. Yes, or a fudge party up-stairs.
Just whatever you say.”
And no amount of hints and polite protests could make Montana
Marie change her mind.
So it was that, still smiling and still arrayed in clinging bejeweled
yellow satin, Montana Marie shook hands with a gloveful of wet
sand, at the door of Susanna’s Chamber of Horrors, stuck her arms
through a hole in the Curtain of Variety, and shrieked as she grasped
first a hot potato, then a large and lively lobster, and finally a paper
snake freshly dipped in thick white paint by Fluffy, so that it would
be sure to feel extra-crawly. Next, after she had assured her captors
that she was enjoying it all,—they inquired at intervals according to
the etiquette of hazing (Harding brand),—she was led up to the
skeleton, which promptly tumbled over upon her with a gruesome
rattle of dry bones. And finally came the spring-board and the
cushions, hemmed in by Susanna’s hanging dresses, from behind
which three little sophomores delivered horrible noises,
accompanying soft, uncanny pats and pushes, while Montana Marie,
still cheerful, though badly scared, minus one gold slipper, and quite
helplessly entangled in her long train, struggled manfully to regain
her feet and maintain her composure.
When they were tired of watching her try to get out, they turned on
a sudden blaze of lights, pulled down the dresses that had been
hung across the door, helped Montana Marie to arise, returned her
slipper, and arranged her train.
Montana Marie blinked at the lights, and smiled blandly at the
assembled company. “Nothing like this in dear old Paree,” she
announced, gasping but happy. “Now at Miss Mallon’s Select School
for American Girls——”
“Hush,” commanded Fluffy. “We aren’t interested in any silly little
boarding-school stories. This is a grown-up college. But as you seem
to want to talk, go ahead—make a speech.”
“GO AHEAD—MAKE A SPEECH”
“On the subject of the Fourth Dimension,” put in Susanna hastily.
“We are all very tired of dear old Paree.”
“But I never heard of——” began Montana Marie.
“Sh!” commanded Susanna sternly. “If you say you’ve never heard of
a thing like the Fourth Dimension, why, here at Harding that means
social ostracism. To use simpler language suitable for very verdant
little girls like you, not to have heard of the Fourth Dimension is a
mark of complete and utter greenness, perfect and unbearable
freshness, and even worse. If you haven’t heard of it, all right, but
don’t say so, unless you want to be finally and forever dropped like—
like a hot potato,”—Susanna glanced smilingly at the Curtain of
Variety,—“by the best Harding circles. If you haven’t heard of it, why,
bluff. Now don’t tell me you never heard of bluffing.”
“Well,” began Montana Marie, still smiling composedly, “you see I
never heard of a lot of things that you do here, because I was
mostly educated in a convent, I suppose. President Wallace
understands that. That’s why he let me in when——”
Marie was too much absorbed in her speech, and her audience were
too busy laughing at her confidential disclosures, to notice a slight
commotion near the door. A second later the room was full of
masked figures in black dominos. Two especially stalwart ones
guarded the door. The rest drew a cordon around the amazed
initiators and producing pieces of stout rope—procured, according to
Straight’s directions, from the night watchman, who was under the
impression that it was wanted by the Belden House matron for
strange purposes of her own—they silently bound their prisoners,
who were too astonished even to struggle, and started them in
procession out the door and up the hall.
Suddenly a black domino cried, “Stop—I mean—halt, prisoners!
We’ve forgotten something.”
For Montana Marie O’Toole still stood as she had been commanded
to do to make her speech, on the quivering middle of the spring-
board in the closet, viewing the performances of the black dominos
with mingled surprise and amusement, manifested, as usual with
her, by a smile, rather faint now, but still somehow infectious.
“We’ve forgotten the principal feature,” the voice went on. “Montana
Marie O’Toole, get down. You’re no longer a persecuted little
freshman. You’ve been nobly rescued by your junior protectors. Now
come and see justice done on these base tormentors of youth and
beauty.”
“All right,” agreed Marie calmly, scrambling down from her uncertain
perch and losing off a slipper again in the process.
Susanna picked it up and handed it to her meekly.
“You’re a champion bluffer, if you don’t know what it means,” Fluffy
told her admiringly. “I suppose you knew all the time that they were
coming, and that was why you just giggled at everything and let us
do our worst.”
Montana Marie O’Toole smiled vaguely back at Fluffy. “Oh, no, I
didn’t know——” she began.
“Of course she didn’t know,” cut in a black domino. “Do you think we
ask the advice of freshmen——”
“Straight Dutton,” cried Fluffy indignantly, “what are you doing
helping a lot of juniors? You belong with us.”
The black domino, thus reproached, shrugged her shoulders
defiantly. “You spoiled my nap and made me mad.” Then she
laughed. “You won’t be a bit mad after we’ve finished with you. Truly
you won’t. We’ve got lovely stunts and the weirdest eats. Forward
march, captives,—and hurry, or we shan’t have time for everything.”
Enthroned on Timmy Wentworth’s writing table, with Eugenia Ford
to coach her in the lines of her part, Montana Marie O’Toole acted as
mistress of the Rescue ceremonies.
“Fluffy Dutton, turn your dress backside front and inside out and
speak a piece.”
“Eugenia Ford, tell us the whole and complete story of the Winsted
men you have flirted with since last week Wednesday.”
“Mary Mason, sing the Rosary without stopping to laugh.”
“Tilly Ann Leavitt, do your Chantecler stunt—all through.”
Montana Marie announced each “lovely stunt,” after Eugenia had
whispered it to her, with much dignity. She watched its performance
gaily, and greeted its climax with a gurgle of appreciative laughter.
When the sun—it was a big jack-o’-lantern, and it had been hastily
sent for from Tilly Ann’s room, to make her Chantecler stunt
complete—when the sun came up over Timmy Wentworth’s screen
and sent long, streaming rays of orange ribbon over the room and
the audience, Montana Marie O’Toole lay back gasping in Eugenia’s
arms.
“I saw that play acted in French, in dear old Paree. Did Miss Leavitt
see it there too? Did she make up that take-off herself? Oh, my, I
feel so perfectly at home here now!” Montana Marie rocked back and
forth in an ecstasy of mirth and satisfaction.
“The world is such a small place,” she added with much originality,
and smiled impartially on all classes present.
Then they turned out the lights and had the “weird eats”—the
largest raw oysters to be bought in Harding, dipped in very thick,
very hot chocolate sauce. And then they had “real food,” namely:
Cousin Kate’s cookies and pineapple ice. Eugenia had requisitioned
the “real food” of Betty Wales, at Straight’s instigation.
“If we gallantly rescue her freshman, she certainly ought to do
something nice for us,” Straight had declared. “Tell her that we
prefer ice to ice-cream, because we—I—have recently had a
headache, and I feel for ice. Tell her she will be an angel to send the
things because we haven’t had a dessert that I like this whole long
week.”
And Betty, who understood all about campus fare, smilingly
promised, and was better than her word to the extent of a huge
pitcher of lemonade.
Montana Marie was proving rather an amusing protégée, she
reflected that evening, after Thomas, the new door and errand boy,
had been dispatched to the Belden with the “real eats.” The girls
liked her, in spite of her queerness, and so did the faculty; at least
several of them had spoken of her to Betty in very friendly terms.
College had been open nearly a month now, but Montana Marie had
not asked for any help from her official tutor except with her
entrance conditions. The one in history she was almost ready to pass
off, Betty thought. She made a note on her engagement pad: “Ask
M. M. how freshman work is going, specially math.” Betty smiled to
herself, as she remembered how scared all the Chapin House crowd
had been over their freshman math. And then in the end nobody
had been even warned except Roberta, and that was because she
was always too frightened that first year to try to recite; Roberta
was labeled a “math. shark” before she graduated.
Betty wondered how the Rescue party was progressing. She wished
she were not a “near-faculty,” with faculty dignity to sustain. She
longed to borrow a black domino and a mask and join the Rescue
party incognito. She thought of a deliciously funny “stunt” to suggest
as Susanna Hart’s penalty for having instigated Montana Marie’s
hazing party. She hoped her freshman would be game—would make
them keep on liking her—now that they had begun.
She stayed late at the Tally-ho working on her accounts, and
reached the campus just in time to run into Montana Marie O’Toole
being escorted home,—at top speed, owing to the exigencies of the
ten o’clock rule,—by Eugenia, the Dutton twins, reunited without
loss of time, and Susanna Hart.
Straight detached herself from escort duty to tell Betty all about the
party. “Part two, the Rescue, was a grand, extra-special success,”
she explained, “and the sophs say that part one was just as good. I
say, Betty, did you give us away? Did you tell Montana Marie about
the Rescue?”
Betty hadn’t even seen her freshman for two days, until to-night’s
brief encounter.
Straight considered. “I wonder if somebody else told her. She didn’t
act a bit surprised. But then she never does act surprised, no matter
what happens or what wild tales we stuff her with. Betty, have you
noticed how you can’t ever tell what she thinks?”
Betty laughed. “I never can tell what people think, Straight, unless
they tell me. It’s only Madeline and you clever twins who can read
people’s minds.”
“Only some people’s,” Straight corrected modestly. “And I don’t
believe even the wonderful Madeline could read Montana Marie’s.
She’s queer. That’s the only word that describes her,—except pretty,
of course,—just queer. First you laugh at her, then you like her, and
before you get tired of her foolishness you get awfully interested in
studying her out. And you can’t. Can’t make her out, I mean. Betty
——” Straight paused at the door of Morton Hall.
“Yes,” laughed Betty.
“Ask her if she knew about to-night’s Rescue party, will you?”
“Of course,” Betty promised. “Fly now, Straight, or you’ll be locked
out.”
“Never.” Straight prepared to fly her fastest. “I’ll bet you anything,
Betty Wales, that you won’t ever find out. Whether she knew, I
mean. Good-night, Betty.”
Straight had flown.
CHAPTER IV
MONTANA MARIE TAKES A RIDE
Georgia Ames had missed Montana Marie’s initiation party, having

been engaged that evening in helping to console Mary Brooks
Hinsdale for the temporary loss of her husband.
“Clever husbands are so intermittent,” Mary had sighed plaintively.
“Now you have them to provide tea for, and other amusements, and
now they’re off to the ends of the earth to deliver a lecture. And
mine won’t ever take me along, because my frivolous aspect rattles
him when he gets up to speak. I presume,” Mary smiled serenely,
“that he also thinks said frivolous aspect would queer him with his
learned friends; only he’s too polite to put it to me so baldly. And the
moral of all this, Georgia, my child, is: Don’t marry a professor,
unless you are prepared to take the consequences. The immediate
consequence is that you’ve got to be Georgia-to-the-Rescue for me
this time, and come up to spend Saturday night.”
“And so,” Georgia explained to Betty later, “I wasn’t on hand to be
Georgia-to-the-Rescue for your freshman. But then she didn’t need
me. She really didn’t even need rescuing. And just to show her how
I admire her pluck, I’ve made the riding-party I’m going off with ask
her to come on our Mountain Day trip.”
“But she can’t possibly get a horse so late in the day,” objected
Betty.
“Belle Joyce has sprained her ankle and gone home, so somebody
else can have the Imp.”
Betty looked anxious. “But, Georgia dear, you know the Imp is a
pretty lively horse. Are you sure that Marie rides well enough to go
off on him with your experienced crowd?”
“Oh, I guess so,” Georgia answered easily. “She’s ridden a lot out
West, she says. She’s telegraphed to Montana for her own saddle
and her riding things, and they ought to be here to-day. When they
come, I’ll take her out on a practice trip to be sure that she can ride.
Nobody wants to kill off your amusing freshman, Betty; so don’t look
so awfully solemn.”
Betty laughed heartily. “Well, you know I had a nice spill here once
myself, and so I believe in being careful. But I think it was ever so
nice of you to include Marie in your party, Georgia.”
“There isn’t a freshman in college who wouldn’t give her best hat for
the chance of going off with our crowd,” Georgia declared modestly.
“It’s funny, isn’t it, Betty, how much the girls care about getting in
with the right college set?”
Betty nodded. “And I’m afraid it’s not because the right college set,
as you call it, generally has the most fun. It’s very often only
because they are silly enough to want the name of being popular.”
“Snobs!” muttered Georgia scornfully. “Well, Montana Marie is no
snob, and thanks mostly to you there aren’t nearly so many snobs in
Harding as there were when I first came up.”
“Really? Do you notice a difference?” demanded Betty eagerly.
“Yes, and lots of it,” declared Georgia, “so don’t work too hard this
year creating the proper college spirit, because you don’t need to.
And don’t worry about our killing off your freshman. Unless I see
that she’s a very good rider on our trial trip, I’ll make her swap off
the Imp with one of the girls who can surely manage him, and take
old Polly. Old Polly wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Montana Marie’s pet saddle and riding clothes did not come until just
in time for Mountain Day, but Georgia took her, according to
promise, for the practice ride, borrowing Straight Dutton’s skirt for
her, and explaining that it was Harding custom not to bother about
hats.
Montana Marie listened graciously to Georgia’s sage advice about
being very careful until you knew your horse; and she made no
objection to starting out on Polly, who was a meek-looking, gentle-
gaited bay with one white foot,—the idol of timid beginners in
Harding riding circles. But before they had gone a mile, Montana
Marie drew rein and announced pleasantly that she couldn’t ride
Polly a step further.
“I suppose I must be too heavy for her. She seems so tired, and she
lags behind so. Would you be willing to change with me, Miss Ames?
You are lighter, and you are used to Polly’s ways. You don’t blame
me, do you, for hating to use up a horse?”
So Montana Marie rode Georgia’s favorite Captain, who single-footed
by choice but would canter if crowded to it. He cantered with
Montana Marie all the way to Far-away Glen, the destination of the
party. There they dismounted to drink out of a mountain spring, and
Montana Marie somehow settled it that the groom from the stables
should go back on Polly, Captain being restored to Georgia, and the
skittish roan named Gold Heels left for herself. Georgia protested
anxiously, but Montana Marie smiled and reassured her.
“Why, you can’t worry about me, Miss Ames. I’ve ridden all my life,”
she said, making the roan curvet and prance on purpose. “I guess I
rode before I walked. But these pancake saddles are the limit, I
think. Just you wait till my own outfit comes, and then I’ll show you
some real riding. My, but it seems like old times to be on a horse! I
had just one ride all the time we were in Paris. Riding in a park is
too slow for me, and besides I hate side-saddles—you can’t use
anything else over there, you know—as I hate—select schools for
girls,” added Montana Marie in an unwonted burst of confidence.
“So you’re glad to be back in America?” asked Georgia idly.
“I should say I am, Miss Ames. Some day you’ll know, maybe, just
how glad I am.”
Georgia was too busy keeping Captain from imitating the roan’s
pernicious tactics in the matter of shying at dead leaves to wonder
exactly what Montana Marie was driving at so earnestly.
“She will be perfectly safe on the Imp,” Georgia reported later to
Betty. “At least I think so, and anyhow she is perfectly set on riding
him, and she said she’d never ride old Polly again, if there wasn’t
another horse in the world. So we shall just have to let her decide
about the risks for herself. Your freshman has a mind of her own,
hasn’t she, Betty?”
Betty agreed laughingly. Montana Marie, when approached by her
official tutor about her freshman class work, particularly freshman
math., had reported easily that she guessed everything was going all
right.
“But anyway, I’m planning to get my entrance conditions off first,”
she announced. “Then I can devote my whole time to regular work.
I believe in being systematic, don’t you, Miss Wales?”
Betty tried to explain that the entrance conditions were regarded by
the Powers as extras, not to take the place or time of regular work.
Montana Marie listened good-naturedly.
“I never could do but one thing at once, Miss Wales,” she explained
at last. “In Germany I forget every word I know of French, and in
dear old Paree I actually almost forget my English. If I could only cut
classes entirely for a week or so and get this entrance history and
Latin prose off my mind!”
“Well, you can’t,” Betty told her decidedly. “Your having so many
conditions will make all your teachers specially particular. The very
least you can do, when President Wallace stretched a rule to let you
in, is not to cut a single, single class, unless you are too ill to go, of
course.”
Montana Marie sighed plaintively. “I never was ill in my life. I think I
am doing fairly well in my studies, Miss Wales. I certainly try hard
enough. After all the fuss I had about getting in, I don’t want to get
out again yet a while. The great trouble is that there are so many
social affairs all the time. When I’m looking forward to a dinner on
the campus or a dance in the gym. or a walk with that cute little
Miss Hart, why I just can’t settle down to study. It was lucky Miss
Hart had an impromptu initiation for me. I shouldn’t have been able
to learn a single lesson with an initiation to look forward to.”
“Then if it diverts your mind to go to things, you simply mustn’t go
to so many, Marie.” Betty tried to look severe and to speak sternly.
“You must refuse some of your invitations. Or else you must learn to
concentrate your mind on whatever you’re doing, work as well as
play. Being able to jump straight from Greek to the sophomore
reception and from chemistry lab. into managing a basket-ball team
is one of the most valuable things you can learn at this college. And
you’ve got to learn it early in freshman year, or you won’t ever get
comfortably through your mid-years.” Betty surveyed Montana
Marie’s unruffled calm rather despairingly.
Montana Marie smiled comfortingly back at her tutor, and then
sighed faintly. “I’m not sure, Miss Wales, that I have any mind to
concentrate. You see in the convent your soul was the most
important thing, and in Miss Mallon’s Select School for American Girls
your manners and the pictures in the Louvre were the most
important. But I promise you that I won’t go everywhere I’m asked
—not anywhere until I’ve passed off my history. And I promise not to
cut, and I’ll ask my teachers right away if my work is satisfactory.”
Betty wrote her mother that night that Marie was developing
wonderfully, quite as Mrs. Wales had prophesied, and that taking
charge of her was really no trouble at all, because she was so
anxious to carry out her part of the bargain she had made with
Betty, to do her best.
“So tell Will to tell Tom Benson,” Betty wrote, “that Miss O’Toole isn’t
a handful. I’m almost afraid she’ll turn out a dig or a prig or
something of that kind, she seems so anxious to do good work. But
all the nicest girls like her, so I guess I needn’t worry about her not
having a good time.”
The day before Mountain Day the history condition was removed
from Miss Montana Marie O’Toole’s record of scholarship, and Betty
congratulated her freshman warmly and went off to spend the
holiday in Babe’s wonderful house on the Hudson feeling as care-
free and irresponsible as if she were a freshman herself.
Georgia’s riding-party was to take horse—this knowing expression
was also Georgia’s—at the Belden at nine o’clock sharp. At a quarter
before the hour Montana Marie, the only off-campus member,
arrived at the rendezvous. Her habit was brown corduroy, her hat a
flapping sombrero, her lovely hair was coiled in a soft knot in her
neck. It looked as if it would fall down before she had mounted, but
not a lock was out of place that night, when Montana Marie rode the
dripping, drooping Imp into his stable-yard half an hour ahead of the
others, and sweetly asked the liveryman if he would mind giving her
a real horse the next time she hired one.
“Because if you can’t, I guess I’ll ask my father to send one of his
East to me,” she explained, reaching down to unbuckle her big
saddle before she slipped easily out of it. “I don’t mean to compare
this horse with old Polly or that silly roan,” she added politely. “But I
do like a little real excitement when I go for a ride.”
If Montana Marie had found her Mountain Day tame, the rest of the
party had not lacked for “real excitement” in generous measure.
Montana Marie had ridden decorously enough between Georgia and
Susanna Hart out of the town and up Sugar Hill to White Birch Lane.
At the turn into the woods she had produced a magenta silk
bandana and knotted it coquettishly at the back of her neck.
“Now I’m a real cow-girl,” she explained. “Ma can educate me all she
wants, but she can’t educate the West out of me. She’d never have
sent me this wild and woolly outfit. She’d have written her New York
tailor to come right up here and fit me out. But I like these things
best, so I just telegraphed to Dad, and he did as I said. He always
does. Now why don’t we race up the next hill?” Montana Marie
started off the Imp with a yodeling shout and a wildly waving arm
that made even sedate old Polly take a keen interest in following.
Susanna Hart’s horse reared, and Fluffy Dutton shrieked hysterically.
Then the skittish roan Gold Heels bolted down a side-path with the
groom from the stable, and before he could get back to his charges’
assistance, a Belden House sophomore, who was always unlucky
with horses, carelessly fell off the Captain’s back. True to his training
the big horse stopped dead in his tracks, and Montana Marie, having
seen the accident over her shoulder, rushed the Imp back,
dismounted, and assisted the unlucky sophomore to her feet with
the sincerest apologies for having “made any one any trouble.”
“If you’d had a saddle like mine you wouldn’t have fallen off,” she
ended regretfully. “You can’t enjoy a real wild ride on those little flat
seats.”
“We’re not out for a wild ride,” Georgia rebuked her sternly. “If you
want to race and make a general disturbance you must ride way
ahead alone. But if I were you——”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think of stirring up anything more,” declared
Montana Marie demurely, pulling the Imp into a decorous park-trot
beside the unlucky sophomore, who was luckily not a bit the worse
for her tumble. “I’m only a little freshman, and I want to learn the
college ways in riding as in other things.” She secreted her magenta
neckerchief again, and “rode like a perfect lady,” to quote from
Georgia’s account of the matter, all the way to Top Notch Falls, and
all the way back against the sunset, until——
Little Eugenia Ford’s horrified description of what happened next was
perhaps the most vivid of those furnished to eager inquirers.
“When we were down on the meadow-road,” Eugenia began that
evening to an attentive audience of her house-mates, “it got a little
bit dusky. We heard some horses coming fast behind us, and it was
my Cousin John Ford, who is a senior at Winsted, and three men
from his frat-house. They stopped to speak to me, and I introduced
them to Fluffy and Montana Marie, who were riding beside me. We
happened to be quite a little ahead of the others. John said
something about Montana Marie’s queer Mexican saddle, and that
freshman put on her awful magenta handkerchief again, and asked
him if he liked cow-girls and ‘real exciting’ rides, and of course John
said yes. And she said to come on then, and hit his horse with her
whip, and they just tore off in the dark.” Eugenia’s big brown eyes
were round with horror. “John is a splendid rider or he wouldn’t have
stayed on, because his horse—it’s one of his own and a
thoroughbred—had never been touched with a whip before, and it
nearly went crazy when Montana Marie whacked it. So his horse flew
and the Imp flew too, and John tried to stop, but she just shouted
again and again, and egged both the horses on. John telephoned me
as soon as I got home, to say that his neck wasn’t broken, and to
inquire for hers. He seemed to think it was a joke, but for my part”—
Eugenia looked as severe as so small and so pretty a young lady was
able to look—“for my part I think it was unladylike and dangerous,
and I hope Georgia will never want to ask her to go riding with us
again. My horse almost ran too.” Eugenia grew a shade more
haughty. “She asked John to call and to bring his three friends. I—
I’m afraid he’ll come.”
“I shouldn’t be much surprised if he did,” agreed a caustic senior,
who roomed next door. “Montana Marie O’Toole is not exactly a lady,
and she—well, I don’t know that she is ever exactly inconsiderate
except on horseback. But she’s always interesting, foot or horseback.
Were your crowd—were you thinking of dropping her because she
messed up your ride?”
Eugenia flushed. “She’s asked the Mountain Day party to dinner to-
morrow night at the Vincent Arms. She boards there, you know. She
seems to be—very rich. I don’t know much about her family, but
Betty Wales has met her mother and liked her. I—I do want to see
the inside of that wonderful boarding-house.”
“Millionairesses’ Hall, isn’t it called?” asked the senior. “Yes, I’ve
wanted to go there too, for dinner, but I don’t know anybody who’ll
ask me. They have flowers on the tables every night, and seven
courses. You’d better go.”
Eugenia considered. “It would be fun. Only—she was really horrid—
racing off that way with John.”
“Maybe he won’t call on her, after all,” consoled the senior. “If he
does—eat her dinner first, drop her afterward. But whether you drop
her or not, she’s bound to stay in fashion here. She’s interesting,
lady or no lady. Don’t go riding with her, if you don’t like her Western
style. But for my part, I think she’s really too good to miss. Now isn’t
it just like that lucky Betty Wales to have the most entertaining
freshman, as well as the most fascinating tea-room, to amuse
herself with?”
At the very moment when the caustic senior was making this
remark, Betty Wales sat at her desk in the fascinating tea-shop. The
entertaining freshman sat beside her. For once she was not smiling.
Spread out on the desk before Betty were three distinct and
separate warnings, in freshman math., freshman Latin, and
freshman lit., respectively. Betty Wales had seen a few warnings
before, but she did not remember any that were quite so frank and
unqualified in their condemnation of the recipient’s scholastic efforts
and attainments as the three euphemistically addressed to Miss M.
M. O’Toole.
CHAPTER V
THE B. C. A.’S “UNDERTAKE” MONTANA MARIE
Madeline Ayres had come up to Harding to celebrate the acceptance

of a novel by her favorite firm of publishers. Babbie Hildreth had
come too, to help Madeline celebrate, and also to talk to Mr. Thayer
about that most important topic, the date of “the” wedding. And so
of course the “B. C. A.’s” had appointed a special tea-drinking, to
celebrate the acceptance of the novel, the visits of Madeline and
Babbie, the prospect of a wedding in their midst, and the general
joys involved in the state of being “Back at the College Again,”—
which is what B. C. A. stood for. Equally of course the tea-drinking
was to be held at the Tally-ho.
But when the hour of the grand celebration arrived, a damper was
put on everything; Betty Wales had sent a hastily scribbled note, by
an accommodating freshman who was going right past the Tally-ho,
to say that she was too busy to come.
“She’s losing her sporting spirit,” declared Madeline sadly. “In days
gone by you could depend on Betty’s turning up for any old lark. She
might be late, if she happened to be pretty busy, but she always got
there in the end.”
“And I wanted to ask her about wedding dates,” wailed Babbie
plaintively. “I can’t have my wedding when Betty can’t come. She’s
almost as important as the groom.”
“Betty is awfully important to such a lot of people,” complained Mary
Brooks Hinsdale, who was looking particularly fascinating in her new
fall suit, the christening of which had added an extra spice of
interest to the grand tea-drinking. “She is altogether too capable for
her own good. If she were only as lazy, or as unreliable, or as devoid
of ideas and energy, as most of those here present, she wouldn’t
find it so hard to escape for tea-drinkings and other pleasant
festivities. Which one of her dependents has her in its clutches this
afternoon, I wonder?”
Babbie, to whom Betty’s note had been addressed, consulted it for
further details. “She says she’s got to tutor a freshman,” Babbie
explained after a minute. “I suppose she is helping along some one
who can’t afford to pay for regular lessons. Seems to me there
ought to be girls enough in college to do that sort of thing without
putting it off on Betty. Betty is too valuable to be wasted on mere
tutoring.”
“Poor girls ought not to need to be tutored,” announced Madeline, in
her oracular manner. “Unless they are bright and shining lights in
their studies, they ought not to try to go through college at all.”
“But Madeline——” chorused the permanent B. C. A.’s—the ones who
were always on hand in Harding, because they were either faculty or
faculty wives. “But Babbie—you two don’t understand. Haven’t you
heard about Betty’s freshman?”
“No, we haven’t,” chorused the new arrivals. “Tell us this minute.”
Mary finally got the floor. “My children,” she began in her most
patronizing style, “our precious Betty Wales is not engaged in
assisting some needy under classman along the royal road to
learning, as you seem to suppose. She is acting as special tutor to
the only daughter of a Montana mining magnate. Named Montana
Marie after the mine, pretty as a picture, clever at horseback riding
but not at mathematics,—and the grand sensation of Harding
College just at present,” ended Mary proudly. Then the permanents
told the “properly excited” newcomers the whole story of Montana
Marie O’Toole.
“She sounds extremely interesting,” said Madeline reflectively, when
they had finished.
“Almost like a ready-made heroine,” suggested Mary, winking
knowingly at the others.
Madeline nodded absently, and everybody laughed at what Mary
called the egotism of the literary instinct.
“Why, haven’t you ever caught Madeline squinting at you to see if
you’ll do for a book?” demanded Mary, elaborating her point. “She
relates everything, even friends, to her Literary Career. I wore my
new suit to-day in the frantic hope that she’d like my looks well
enough to put me into a play. I should simply adore seeing myself in
a play,” sighed Mary.
“Well, you never will,” Madeline assured her blandly. “Not while you
call me ‘my child,’ and patronize me instead of my tea-shop.”
Mary listened, wearing her beamish smile. “Egotism of the literary
instinct again—she makes a personal matter out of everything. Now,
if you’ve quite finished explaining your methods of literary work,
suppose we return to the business of the meeting, which is——”
“Which seems to be your frivolous methods of securing the attention
of the wise and great by wearing new clothes,” cut in Madeline
promptly. “A very interesting subject, too, isn’t it, my children?”
Mary faced the challenger coldly. “The real business of the meeting,”
she announced, “is the rescue of Betty Wales from the clutches of
her too-numerous jobs, charities, helpful ideas, and noble ambitions,
including that interesting but heavily conditioned freshman, Montana
Marie O’Toole.”
“But I thought Georgia had been regularly ‘elected’ to look out for
Betty,” suggested Christy Mason.
“Well, Georgia is only one,” explained Helen Chase Adams seriously,
“and being a prominent senior keeps her fairly busy, I imagine. And
then Betty doesn’t want to be rescued. It’s very hard to look out for
a person that doesn’t want you to look out for him—her,” amended
Helen hastily, with a vivid blush that instantly created another
digression among the B. C. A.’s.
“I thought you didn’t like men, Helen Chase.”
“Who is he? Who is your protégé who objects to being looked after,
Helen?”
“When you said ‘him’ you were only trying to speak good English?
Well, isn’t ‘her’ as good English as ‘him’?”
“You might as well own up to him right off and save yourself a lot of
trouble. Detective Ayres will shadow you till you confess.”
But Helen displayed a hitherto unsuspected talent for clever
sparring. “It’s just like you girls to make a lot out of a little,” she
declared, so earnestly that everybody saw she meant it. “That’s why
we have such good times,—because you make all the stupid little
things in life seem interesting.”
“Well, don’t dare to deny that you’re a stupid little thing,” Mary told
her, with an appreciative pat to emphasize that she was only joking.
“And please be duly thankful that we can make even you seem
interesting.”
“Oh, I am grateful,” Helen told her, with pretty seriousness. “But you
ought to keep within the probabilities, and you ought to have more
variety about your inventions. We’ve got romances enough on hand,
without making up one for me.”
“The business of this meeting——” began Mary again at last,
pounding hard on the table with one of the fascinating fat mustard
jars which Madeline had summarily bought in London to start the
Tally-ho Tea-Shop. “The business of this meeting——”
“Is just coming in at the door,” Rachel Morrison laughingly finished
Mary’s sentence for her.
And sure enough, Betty Wales, looking very young, very pretty, also
very care-free and happy for a person in dire need of rescue, was
shutting the door with one hand, giving Emily Davis a handful of
letters and memoranda with the other, and telling Nora about a
special dinner order for that evening as she slipped off her ulster.
Then she made a bee-line for Jack o’ Hearts’ stall and the Merry
Hearts.
“Let me in—way in, please,” she begged, scrambling past Babbie,
Helen, and Mary to the most secluded seat at the back of the stall.
“I came after all, because I wanted some fun, and I won’t be
dragged out to talk to anybody about dinners they want me to plan,
or Student’s Aid things, or Morton Hall things—or even a conditioned
freshman,” she concluded with a particularly vindictive emphasis on
the last phrase.
“Hear! Hear!” cried Christy Mason.
“Oh, now I think maybe she’ll run away again to come to my
wedding,” sighed Babbie, in deep relief.
“After all, she hasn’t lost her sporting spirit,” Madeline rejoiced.
“She’s the same old Betty Wales, better late than never, and quite
capable of looking out for herself, as well as for all the bothering
jobs and charities and incompetent friends and touchy millionaires
and insistent suitors and helpful ideas and noble ambitions that
clutch at her with octopus fingers and threaten to drag her down.”
“Don’t talk like a book, Madeline,” Mary criticized. “And don’t be too
cock-sure that you’re right. Just because Betty couldn’t stand it
another minute and has rushed to cover, so to speak, in our midst, I
for one refuse to be convinced that she doesn’t need help in fighting
the octopus.”
Betty brushed a rebellious curl out of her eyes with a tired little
gesture, and stared curiously at the disputants. “What in the world
are you talking about?” she demanded. “Mary dear, please explain,
because Madeline’s explanations usually just mix things up more
than ever.”
Mary explained, noisily assisted by all the other B. C. A.’s, including
Madeline, who “explained” at length how forgiving she was by
nature, advised Mary to adopt the proud peacock as her sacred bird,
and finally demanded of Betty if she—Madeline—hadn’t been
perfectly correct in saying that she—Betty—was perfectly capable of
getting along all right, if only she was not hampered by one more
bother,—the unasked advice and assistance of the B. C. A.’s.

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