“Pass the butter!” advised Mamie Dunn, springing the old joke on Maude.
Maude, however, was not to be so easily silenced on this occasion. She rose up haughtily, her usually colorless face ugly with splotches of red.
“Let me tell you—all you smarties,” she said, greatly enraged—“that this has been a most unfairly conducted contest. You all know it. Success has not gone to the best player, but to one who is, in some mysterious way, momentarily popular. Perhaps it is out of pity for her poverty that Miss Baldwin has been given the place on the first team, a place that belongs to a better player.”
“Yourself, for instance?” drawled Molly. “With two fumbles and three interferences to your credit when you were last tried out?”
“Not my fault!” snapped back Maude.
“Oh, hush, Grimshaw!” advised a senior. “You’re making yourself ridiculous; don’t you know that? And Miss Carroll is looking this way.”
“Let Miss Carroll hear,” hissed Maude. “All the teachers had better hear. We are supposed to be decently honest in this school; but all of us are not.”
“Hear! hear!” interposed somebody, sotto voce. “Confession is good for the soul.”
“You think you are smart!” flared up Maude, looking around without identifying the speaker. “But perhaps it would be just as well if some inquiry were made as to why this new member of the first basket-ball team came to be turned out of Severn Lodge and forbidden even to go there again. Oh! I know what I am talking about—and so does she.”
With this last phrase spoken in a most insolent way, Maude stalked from the table. Molly jumped up to follow her, “spitting like a bad firecracker,” as somebody said; but Beth pulled her back into her seat.