“A few still like me, though!” put in Jacquette, with a mimic pout.
“A few, indeed! Yes; and my lecture’s no sign I don’t.”
“Please, sir, where is the lecture?”
“Look here, Jack, I’m in earnest. You’re four years younger than I am, and I’ve been studying your case—you needn’t laugh—and I’ve made up my mind that you take your sorority too hard, for one thing. You girls all do. You put it ahead of everything else, and it wears you out. Now, I’d like to see you make up your mind that next year you’ll spend more time in gym, and less on sorority business. Why don’t you go in for basket-ball?”
“Dr. Bobs Drake!” Jacquette mocked, but she liked the lecture, for all that. “Look at Louise Markham! She’s a sorority girl, and a splendid student and a picture of radiant health, at the end of her high-school course. Now, where’s your argument?”
“Jack,” he answered, “I don’t know what the sorority cause is going to do, next year, when Louise goes off to college. Have you ever noticed how she’s the one girl that’s always pointed at, to prove that sororities aren’t harmful? She’s a stunning argument, but I don’t know another girl anywhere who can carry all the school work and all the social business she can, and not get fagged. You know very well that, with most of them, the school work has to go under. Isn’t that so? Honest, now.”
“What about fraternities?” Jacquette evaded. “You’re a pretty one to preach, with your pin right there in sight!”
“Oh, boys are different. We have a lot of fun, but we don’t get tragic over it and have hysterics and nervous prostration the way the girls do. Do you suppose my fraternity ever kept me from eating three square meals a day? I don’t believe it has interfered with my studies much, either, for that matter.”
“If that isn’t just like a boy!” Jacquette retorted. “Fraternities are all right for them, but sororities are bad for girls! You ask any of the teachers at Marston, and I’ll wager they’ll tell you there isn’t much choice between frats and sororities! Anyway, Bobs Drake,” she added, shifting base with feminine agility, “so far as school work is concerned, my sorority hasn’t interfered with mine one bit more than football has with yours.”
“You can’t tell me anything about that,” he admitted. “And I’ve played my last football, too.”