“What an honor for Jim!” she put it. “He’ll be so set up. He’s looking forward to a calm, brotherly evening with me, and now he’ll find himself up in the receiving line, jollying the patronesses and the class officers. And I—oh, it doesn’t matter. I know plenty of other men. But I do want Jim to have a good time.”
In the end Eleanor watched the prom. from the gallery, except during three dances that Rachel insisted upon her having with Jim. She had looked forward to taking Jim to her prom. too eagerly to care to put up with any second-best escort, and besides the men she had cultivated in her first two years at Harding—Paul West and his set—were utterly distasteful to her now.
Jean Eastman had her characteristic comment to make on Eleanor’s sacrifice. “Bidding for popularity with the class, I suppose,” she said. “A very pretty play to the gallery it is, and just before she comes up at Dramatic Club, too. I wonder if it will work.”
So it was somewhat of a surprise to her when she discovered at the next Dramatic Club meeting that Eleanor had asked to have her name definitely withdrawn.
“I can’t feel that it would be right for me to go in,” she explained to Miss Ferris and to Betty Wales, the two who had seen her through that trying sophomore spring term. “A Dramatic Club election is an official honor, and it ought never to go to any one who doesn’t thoroughly deserve it. I got it under false pretenses and I should never feel as if it really belonged to me.”
CHAPTER XVII
HELEN’S DAY—AND ELEANOR’S
It was a week after the “prom.;” all the men had gone home, and all the violets had faded, before anything else of particular interest took place. Mary Brooks, to be sure, had been going about wearing her preoccupied, important air and had declined various invitations on the plea that she was busy; but nobody thought anything of that, because Mary was always having periods of strenuous and conscientious effort, surrounded on all sides, as Katherine Kittredge put it, by periods of the exact opposite.
Nearly all the “literary” juniors, together with a good many like Betty Wales who were not in the least literary, took Miss Raymond’s theme course. The bulletin boards were just outside the door of her recitation room, so that part of the hall was always noisy and crowded between classes; and at the close of the hour on this particular Wednesday morning there seemed to be even more confusion there than usual. But the class paid very little heed to what was going on outside. Miss Raymond had a way of bringing up interesting points that the recitation period was much too short to dispose of, and they sauntered out in this usual leisurely fashion, arguing about the merits of the theme that had just been read—a spirited essay of Eleanor Watson’s. Helen Adams happened to be the last one in the line, and at Miss Raymond’s desk she stopped to ask a question.