"It is quite true," she said, "that with the old shell we have been rowing in, it will be perfectly impossible for our eight to win the race. We are all agreed on that?"
"And all the sane ones are agreed that you couldn't win in any boat," declared Hester, in her very meanest way.
"Now, I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Hessie," complained Nellie Agnew.
"And it isn't so, either!" exclaimed Jess Morse.
"Give us a good shell and we'll show you," said Dorothy Lockwood.
"That is what we need," agreed her twin.
"Of course we can win under any decent circumstances," said Laura, "now that we have Bobby Hargrew to be coxswain again."
Hester was silenced for the time. "Bobby," or Clara Hargrew, had been in difficulties with the school authorities a few weeks before, and had been debarred from all the after-hour athletics—and Hester Grimes had been partly to blame for Bobby's trouble.
"The point of the whole matter is," said Celia Prime, one of the older girls, who was on the point of graduating from Central High, "that the eight need and must have a new shell. Our present boat is a disgrace."
"I object to our centering all our efforts upon that particular boat and crew," snapped Hester.