Campus Tramp Read Free Page B

lean but well-formed legs and taut buttocks. Her breasts were small but perfectly formed, little girl’s breasts that were rounded and firm and eminently touchable.
    Ruth Hardy’s face was pretty, with a small red mouth and sharp blue eyes that looked straight at a person. Her gaze never wandered and she rarely blinked. She looked at people as she did everything else—neatly and precisely with no waste motion.
    She was Linda’s roommate. They shared a little cubicle in Evans Hall, a tiny unprepossessing room with a double-decker bed, two desks, two dressers, a closet that was not quite large enough for two people and a sink that dripped, its bowl stained from the dripping of the hard water. The water, with a high iron content typical of the region, managed to do two things—it stained the sink a sickish red-brown and it forced a girl to spend twice as much time as usual washing her hair.
    Linda had just finished washing her hair. First she had showered, and in this respect the hard water was good. It left her feeling cleaner, without the slippery feeling of a softwater shower. But her hair! God, she had had to lather it a good half-dozen times before she was done. Now it hung down her back, wet and limp, as she sat in a chair in the room.
    Ruth was sprawled on her bed. She had the top bunk, and both the girls were quite satisfied with the arrangement.
    “I’m a sound sleeper,” Ruth had explained. “This way you can give me a good kick when the alarm goes off.”
    They became friends quite readily. Linda decided that she liked this girl, this sharp, fast-talking little thing from New York City. And, she reflected, it was good that they had taken to each other as readily as they did. There were no fraternities or sororities at Clifton, since social groups of that nature were hardly needed on a campus of 1500. She and Ruth would be stuck with each other for the semester at least and probably for the year; it would be a lot easier to take if they liked each other.
    Their conversation rambled the way conversation does between two persons suddenly thrust into a close relationship. Ruth told her that she was from New York and that she had come to Clifton largely to get away from a family with which she didn’t get along well at all. She planned to major in either psychology or sociology and possibly to do graduate work after finishing up at Clifton. Linda answered that she would major in English, that she doubted that she would do graduate work in anything, since it was highly doubtful that she would graduate.
    “How come?”
    “I’ll probably be married by then.”
    “That why you came to college?”
    Linda hesitated. “Partly, I guess. Oh, I suppose I want to get an education, whatever that means. But I’m not the scholar type or the career type. I guess I’m looking for a man.”
    “Well, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a man here, not the way you look. You’ll probably have to beat them off with a club.”
    Linda felt herself blushing.
    “I mean it,” Ruth went on. “All that blonde hair and a shape like yours—the guys won’t let you alone. You know much about this school?”
    “Just what it says in the catalogue.”
    Ruth laughed. “It doesn’t say much in the catalogue. I know one girl who goes here, a sophomore gal named Sheila Ashley. She told me they call the catalogue The Big Lie. But the one big selling point they left out is that there are three men for every gal at Clifton College, Citadel of Higher Learning.”
    “Oh.”
    “ Oh is right. It’s a damn nice ratio.”
    Linda nodded.
    “Of course,” Ruth continued, “there’s a difference between finding a man and finding a husband. Men are nice to have around, but most of them are interested in just one thing. Know what the thing is?”
    Linda felt herself beginning to blush again and fought to suppress it. Why did Ruth have that effect on her? Maybe it was the hard, cool stare in the girl’s blue eyes, the casual