“No such thing! We’d trust her anywhere, but——”
“Never mind!” Bertha broke in, tragically. “Remember one thing: By fair means or foul, we’ll have your pledge at our spread, this afternoon—see if we don’t!”
A door opened. “My little children—my little children!” said the soft voice of Mademoiselle Dubois. “Tardy!—every one of you! Scamper, pets!”
The girls scattered. It was an incongruous sight, these tall, well-dressed young ladies, quarrelling like children. As they separated, with resentful glances at one another, Bertha drew Margaret’s arm through hers, but Margaret looked back over her shoulder with a half ashamed expression, and Jacquette, meeting her eyes, remembered their happy friendship in Brookdale, and felt suddenly foolish.
As she turned to go into the cloak-room, Mademoiselle spoke to her. “My little Willard,” she said, “in this school there are twenty-five teachers, all trying to pump knowledge of various kinds into the heads of a thousand or more little children. This is called getting a high-school education, but I ask you, honey, if these little heads are quite, quite full of something else, how can the knowledge be put in?”
Jacquette felt the force of this appeal, but, none the less, her strongest feeling, as she took her seat, was lively curiosity to know just what was being done to protect that Sigma Pi pledge from the Kappa Deltas.
At the beginning of second hour, she hurried into the hall and met Mamie Coolidge, who had all the news and told it eagerly. One of the Sigma Pi girls, she said, had gone to the principal and had him excuse her from the first two hours of school, on the plea that she must attend to some necessary business, and two more of the girls had secured the same kind of an excuse from their room teachers. Then they had gone out to the corner drugstore and had telephoned, not only to Winifred’s mother, warning her against the dishonourable Kappa Deltas, but to some of the Sigma Pi alumnæ, and to certain mothers of Sigma Pi girls, who might do something during the day to influence Mrs. Pierce in favour of Sigma Pi.
“Did the girls cut two hours of school to do that telephoning?” Jacquette asked, uneasily.
“Oh, yes; ’twas nothing but study hours for any of them,” Mamie answered, carelessly. “They didn’t miss any recitations, at all. Mercy, that’s the least they could do for Sigma Pi, if they’re loyal, I should say! Oh, and Jacquette, Mrs. Pierce promised that Winifred shouldn’t go to the Kappa Delt spread, and the girls have decided to have a special initiation to-morrow and take her in right away, just to show the Kappa Delts. That is, they want to if the rest of you agree. Blanche and Etta are planning it now. It’s study period for them; so they can.”
That was all Jacquette had time to hear, and she was late at her algebra class, as it was.