“Splendid! Fine! Just the thing!” chorused everybody at once.
“Now Betty Wales,” shouted Madeline in triumph, as soon as she could be heard above the din, “can’t you see that an object isn’t at all necessary? ‘The Merry Hearts’ needn’t do a thing but enjoy themselves.”
“Well then, that’s an object, isn’t it?” retorted Helen, rushing gallantly to Betty’s defense. “Having a good time is an object just as much as sending missionaries to China.”
“I suppose it is,” confessed Madeline, resignedly. “Anyhow, I can’t hope to win an argument against the prod. of the logic class and a member of Philosophical, so I give up.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about Logic,” said Babe, “but I’m sure that this is just the name we want. Everybody knows that we have the best time going. And when we go we can pass the society on to the jolliest crowd that’s left.”
“But don’t you think,” began Katherine, dubiously, “that it’s rather silly for us to have a society just for fun? We’re called ‘The Clan’ now, you know. We see one another all the time, and we couldn’t possibly have more fun than we do as it is.”
“Oh, but it will be so much stuntier this new way,” demurred Bob.
Betty had been listening to the discussion rather absently, wanting to make a suggestion and wondering how the girls would receive it. She had not forgotten her last evening with Dorothy King, nor Dorothy’s parting injunction. “See that everybody has a fair chance and a good time,” Dorothy had said, and Betty had been trying to do it. But Harding was a big college, and there were so many other things to attend to. If only the clan would help! Katherine’s speech gave her her opportunity, and she seized it eagerly.
“Oh, girls,” she said, “don’t you think it would be nice for ‘The Merry Hearts’ to try to make other people have a good time too? As K. says, we have as much fun as we possibly can now; and so many girls don’t have any. Don’t you think it would be nice to try to make more ‘Merry Hearts’ in Harding?”
Most of the clan looked doubtful, and Babe’s smooth forehead was puckered into a frown of disapproval. “Anybody can have a good time here if they try,” she asserted ungrammatically.