Jacquette flushed. “Pity’s wasted, Etta,” she answered, rather curtly. “I expect to have a carriage.”
“But since when?” Mamie persisted. “Flo Burton told me you couldn’t.”
“If you want the whole story, it’s this,” said Jacquette. “At first, Aunt Sula didn’t like my asking a boy to take me to the dance, but when she found it was the sorority way, she let me invite Bobs. Then, when she found that he was expected to pay for a carriage, she did suggest that I do without one. You see, she supposed, because we’re young, the whole thing would be simple—early hours and all that. But when I told her how it really was, she said she was going to hire the carriage for me herself, and that I should invite Louise and Bud Banister to go in it with Bobs and me. So I did.”
“And a lovely plan, I call it!” Louise chimed in. “You’d have laughed to see the look of relief on Bud’s face when I told him! It isn’t so easy for him to get money from his father, I guess. You know, girls, it is a sort of hold-up, the way we invite the boys and expect them to furnish carriages.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mamie objected, while she dropped another lump of sugar in her chocolate. “They get a chance to come to a dance that costs us nearly three hundred dollars. My mother thought that was terribly extravagant until I told her how much worse some other sororities are. Did you know the Omikron Gammas had to put up twenty dollars apiece for their dance, besides the regular dues? I say it’s pretty creditable to Sigma Pi, that we draw all our funds out of the bank and give our dance without any extra taxing, when we may be needing that money any time, to fight the Board of Education with!”
“There are signs of hot chocolate on the horizon!”
Everybody, except Mamie, laughed. She was the spoiled child of Sigma Pi, and when she lifted her doll face to make a remark it was always the signal for indulgent smiles.
“I wouldn’t say that outside, Mame,” Blanche advised. “It might not sound well to the school authorities.”
“It’s true, just the same. Didn’t Sigma Pi have to give a hundred dollars to the inter-fraternal league, last year, when we got the injunction to keep the Board from enforcing that rule against secret societies? And if the Board makes any more silly old rules, the boys say we’ll have to get a good lawyer, and fight the thing to a finish.”