“That’s so,” she said; “it’s too late. An initiation that takes all day ought not to run into the night like this. Jacquette,” she concluded, “I’ll make this bargain with you. I’ll be a friend to Sigma Pi, and never criticise it except as I may suggest something when we are all alone, if you’ll try your best to change these points I’ve spoken of.”
“Oh, Tia!” Jacquette protested, lifting her head. “You forget that I’m one insignificant little freshman. The girls wouldn’t listen to me.”
“One insignificant little freshman with the courage of her convictions can do something. I only ask you to try your best.”
The golden head dropped again, and the little clock ticked away minute after minute while the soft light of the fire wavered over two still figures. At last the tall girl stood up. “I’m going to try,” she said, very gravely. “Give me your hand, Tia. Put your fingers this way. No, this way. There. It would be wrong for me to tell this to anyone else in the world outside of my sorority—and the girls might not understand how it’s right for me to tell even you—but that’s the Sigma Pi grip on our bargain! Good-night, darling.”
CHAPTER IV
BOBS
IT was the noon half-hour at Marston High, and boys and girls were crowding into the little bakery familiarly known among them as the “eat-house.”
Louise Markham and Jacquette had been lucky enough to get a seat at one of the three oilcloth-covered tables, but by far the larger number, with their sandwiches in their hands, were good-naturedly jostling for standing-room.
Jacquette had decided that day, after a few weeks of single-handed effort, to take Louise into her confidence about the bargain with Aunt Sula, and Louise’s hearty response had been an immense relief.
“Your aunt’s exactly right!” she had declared. “She’s gone straight to the weak points of Sigma Pi. Talk about a sorority helping scholarship! The only thing that has saved my scholarship at Marston is the fact that my mother wouldn’t let me go Sigma Pi until I was a junior, and, even since then, it has been hard work to keep sorority business from interfering with my school work. I believe any girl that gets deep in sorority doings the first year of high school will have trouble straightening things out and doing well with her studies the rest of the time, and I want you to tell your Aunt Sula, Jacquette, that I’ll stand by and work for every reform she asked for. I can propose things, being a senior, that the girls wouldn’t take from you, and I believe we can accomplish something.”