Aunt Sula had some difficulty in explaining these “initiation stunts” to her courtly old father, especially after he had tried in vain to make polite conversation with the two girls who had been rendered deaf and dumb by their vow of silence.
“Nothing excuses such rudeness, daughter,” he remonstrated, shaking his silvery head. “I don’t like this sorosis Jacquette is in.”
“Sorority, father,” Miss Granville prompted, with a smile.
“Call it what you will; it’s just as bad,” he persisted. “Those girls are too young to run such a society. They’ve proved it, to-day.”
At ten o’clock that evening, a telephone inquiry brought back from Jacquette the word that the initiation was over, but refreshments were not, and that a crowd of Beta Sigs, Quis among the number, had discovered what was going on, and had broken into Nell’s house, and insisted on being served with some of the goodies. “Oh, we’re having such fun, Tia!” Jacquette concluded. “Don’t sit up for me, you and grandpa. Quis will bring me home, and I’ll come as soon as I possibly can.”
Old Mr. Granville went to rest, then, shaking his head over the change since the good old days in the country when his daughters were young, but Aunt Sula sat in her room and waited. It was after midnight when she finally heard the careful click of the front door latch and the creak of the stairs as a much-subdued girl crept up.
The feasting at Nell’s had lasted a little too long, and had been a little too noisy. Before the party had dispersed, Mr. Brewster, a blunt, outspoken man, had come down to the dining-room, where the boys were pelting each other with cake, and had given them a piece of his mind as to proper hours and fitting behaviour. Most of the girls had cried; the boys had gone home insulted and angry; but, all the time, deep in her heart, Jacquette had felt that Nell’s father had just cause for his action, and now, as she laid off her wraps in her own room, she owned to herself that she was ashamed of the Sigma Pi initiation.
Not since Brookdale had she needed, as she did at that minute, to talk things over with Aunt Sula, and when she saw the light still burning at the end of the hall, she went to the door, and peeped in.
Sula Granville, in a pale blue wrapper, sat before the fire brushing out her long dark hair. She looked extremely girlish in the dim, flickering light, but Jacquette was not thinking of this as she paused in the doorway. Her heart was hungering for the sympathy which had always been hers, at need, from the only mother she had ever known, and she hesitated, now, because of a vague, unhappy feeling that something had come between them. It was a relief, then, when Aunt Sula, looking up, held out her hands without a word, and the next instant found Jacquette on her knees with both arms round the blue wrapper.
Little by little the story of the evening came out, and, when she had heard it all, Aunt Sula said, “Come down here, girlie, with your head on my knee—the old Brookdale way.”