“No; I don’t. He’s afraid people may think he knew what Clarence was going to do; so he’s making his disapproval as public as he can. Of course he won’t let Clarence into Beta Sig, now, and he’d like to have him expelled from school, but Mr. Branch takes the ground that Clarence is less to blame than the big boys that talked all this feeling into him. If that’s so, I’m partly responsible, too; he overheard me talking to Bobs about it, and that influenced him, you see.”
“But that’s no excuse for what he did!”
“No; Mr. Branch doesn’t excuse him, but he says Clarence is so much younger, and so easily influenced that he’s like one of these anarchists that get all inflamed by speeches they’ve heard and things they’ve read, and imagine they’re doing a heroic act when they go and shoot the President. You ought to have heard him lecture the Beta Sig fellows in the talk he gave yesterday. He says Clarence actually expected they would applaud him, and that it reflects great discredit on them.”
“Well, there’s something in that, isn’t there? But, if I were Clarence I’d sooner be expelled than come back to Marston and face the feeling there is.”
“He’s not coming back. His father is going to send him to military school. Louise, did you know that Bobs went to Mr. Branch and told him that, as far as he was concerned, he hoped Clarence would get another chance?”
“No! What did Quis think of that?”
“Oh, Quis doesn’t like anything Bobs does! Here he’s won his emblem, but he says it’s no thanks to Bobs; that he never would have got it if Bobs hadn’t been locked up. I wish you’d talk to him. He’s so jealous of my liking any boy outside of his frat! This morning he accused me of getting the girls to give our dance on the same night the Beta Sigs have theirs, so that he’d be tied up for that evening and I could feel free to ask Bobs!”
“Foolishness!”
“He doesn’t know it’s foolishness, though. Louise—” Jacquette lowered her voice as if she knew she were uttering heresy—“with Quis acting this way, and the Sigma Pi girls calling me disloyal every time I look at an old friend like Margaret Howland—I sometimes wish there were no such thing as a fraternity or sorority in school!”
Louise turned and looked at the tired, flushed face.