FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT.
For the Sake of Argument.
"For we are frank and twenty
And the spring is in the air!"
Hovey.
"Well!" said Miss Meiggs, spreading across her lap one of the Beta Rhos' new monogrammed napkins, "I must say your being here is a surprise."
Pellams answered in vague interrogation, not a little surprised, himself, to be caught at a "girl-supper." Now that he was cornered, it would be uselessly impolite to tell her how the Chapter had reasoned and pleaded with him until at the last minute "Cap" Smith ruined his clever escape by catching him midway down a porch pillar. Smith, sitting on the other side of Katharine Graham and wearing the smile of satisfied revenge, would doubtless enjoy telling it. There was so much of genial malevolence in that smile that Pellams, the woman-hater, who knew only enough of the co-eds to avoid them, wondered what sort of a girl he had been placed next to at supper. He had an intuitive idea that she had been given him by general consent. An experienced society man would have scented this at once in the company of Mrs. Perkins, for when there is a choice of tables, chapter-mothers are apt to sit where there is the least sentiment; but this was the Junior's début, practically, and he was conscious of little more than that the fellows had it "in" for him, and that this girl had begun the conversation by a personal remark.
"I judged," the girl was saying, not having waited for any explanation, "that in the milder forms of social entertainment you were somewhat out of your element."