Betty’s thoughts flew back to Georgia. “I wish I thought so.”
“Well,” said Jean fiercely, “I do. That’s why I’ve always hated you. I presume I shall hate you worse than ever to-morrow. Meanwhile, will you please tell Barbara? I can’t help what they all think, and I don’t care. I only wanted you to see that I’ve got a little sense of obligation left and that after I’ve let a person apologize—Don’t come any further, please.”
Jean ran swiftly down the steep path leading to the lower level of the back campus and Betty turned obediently toward home, feeling very small and useless and unhappy. Jean’s announcement had been so sudden and so amazing that she didn’t know what she had said in response to it, and she was quite sure that she hadn’t done at all what Jean expected. Then this confirmation of her suspicions about Jean gave her an uneasy feeling about Georgia. That baffling young person was just leaving the gym as Betty got back to it, and the sight of her surrounded by a bevy of her admiring friends reassured Betty wonderfully. Nevertheless she decided to go and see Miss Ferris. There was something she wanted to ask about.
After half an hour spent in Miss Ferris’s cozy sitting-room, she started out to find Barbara, armed with the serene conviction that everything would come out right in the end.
“How do people influence other people?” she had demanded early in her call. “There is some one I want to influence, if I could, but I don’t know how to begin.”
“That’s a big question, Betty,” Miss Ferris assured her smilingly. “In general I think the best way to influence people is to be ourselves the things we want them to be—honest and true and kind.”
Betty mused on this advice as she crossed the campus. “That was a good deal what Jean said. I guess I must just attend to my own affairs and wait and let things happen, the way Madeline does. This about Jean just happened.”
She passed Georgia’s door on her way up-stairs. The room was full of girls, listening admiringly to their hostess’s reminiscences of the afternoon. “That sophomore guard was so rattled. She kept saying, ‘I will, I will, I will,’ between her teeth and she was so busy saying it that she forgot to go for the ball. But she didn’t forget to stick her elbow into me between times—not she. I wanted to slug her a little just for fun, but of course I wouldn’t. I perfectly hate people who don’t play fair.”
Betty went on up the stairs smiling happily. She wanted to hug Georgia for that last sentence.