"I know that, and Miss Thurston is all right, but why these Saturday sewing bees?"
"To pay for the things she got from Louise Baker, if you must know."
"I wonder if you are not spoiling Polly," said Cordelia thoughtfully. "I saw her at the concert Friday night with that Mr. Austin who used to come here sometimes on Friday evenings to see you. She certainly looked like a dream, but she is thinner than she was and her eyes are getting too big for her face. She is doing too much, and is working too hard for the things that she didn't care for when she first came. Aren't you afraid you will arouse an ambition which will make her restless and unhappy when she goes home and can have none of the things she is growing to depend upon? If she has to struggle through college, and doesn't have you for the last years of it, to think up ways and means for her, what will she amount to? And if she makes clothes the great desideratum, how is she to make her studying tell?"
"To hear you talk, Cordelia Lodge," said Janet, with some asperity, "one would suppose that poor little Polly had suddenly developed an inordinate love of dress and that she was wasting her time and her substance on the most expensive and gorgeous attire, when all the poor little child wants is to appear as respectably clad as her classmates. I think it is a shame to grudge her that. You would consider the costume she wore the other night as too plain to wear on such an occasion; a second-hand hat and coat, and a cheap skirt. I don't see what makes you talk so."
"Oh, don't get huffy," said Cordelia, still dissatisfied. "I can't help it. She was twice as interesting in her old clothes, I think. Now that she is like everybody else, one ceases to consider her a heroine, and she'll not receive half the consideration that she did from most of the girls."
"Well, she may be less interesting to you," returned Janet, "but she is certainly more interesting to some one else, and that is the great point."
"You mean Mr. Austin?"
Janet nodded an affirmative.
"Oh well, if it is college versus a man, I have nothing more to say. If that is a matter of the first importance, good-bye honors and a good college record. Why can't she wait till she is through college before she thinks of such things? She is young enough, goodness knows. Besides, Van Austin is the kind to have any number of affairs, and what if she wastes all her year over him and comes back to find he has another affair on hand? It will probably make her so miserable that she can't do herself justice in her classes and then where is the benefit of college to her?"
"I don't think Polly's college record will suffer," said Janet stiffly.