"Dear me, then let her be," said Janet. "We can't help it. I'd rather it were that, than something else, though I can't help laughing to think how we have been fooled, and how she has been, too, for that matter. I like the girls in our frat so much the best of any, and even if we hadn't pledged, I wouldn't change, would you?"
"Indeed, I would not," replied Edna. "We must not breathe a word of this to any of the other girls, though," she said, as she went back to her theme.
Their conjectures proved to be quite true, for from that time, Hester dropped them, and not only she but several others, who had been particularly agreeable to Janet and Edna in the interest of their fraternity, after this had no more attentions for them.
However, with their new friends, the girls were content, and felt that their fraternity privileges were very great, since it gave them an intimacy with those of the seniors whom it would have been difficult in any other way to meet.
It was to Becky Burdett's pretty home that the girls liked specially to go, for Becky was a city girl and could eschew boarding houses, dormitories and regulations, and was much sought after because of this, and because she was a thoroughly generous-hearted, loyal and lovable girl. She was friendly, too, with a number of the faculty, and visited Professor Newcomb's wife and Professor Satterthwaite's daughters, so that she seemed to the innocent little freshmen a person living within a charmed circle.
"Could you ever, ever imagine yourself on jocose terms with your professor of mathematics?" said Janet as the two girls settled down one afternoon for hard work. "I nearly have nervous prostration if I happen to come face to face with him on the street, and to sit at his right hand at table would finish me completely."
"Well, since you don't have to sit at his right hand," said Edna, "why these remarks?"
"I was thinking of something Becky Burdett told me; of a joke Mr. Satterthwaite told her, and I couldn't imagine his condescending to anything so light."
"My dear, he is but a man, and probably his wife finds him very human," returned Edna sagely. "I am not half so much afraid of him as of Miss Drake. She is so terribly dignified and stately that she freezes me to an icicle. Imagine kissing her, or having little quips with her. Gracious! I'd as soon try to tickle an iceberg or a polar bear."
"Who's a polar bear?" asked some one putting her head in at the door. "I knocked, but you didn't hear. I came to borrow some alcohol."