“Why, Quis, I do know about secret societies in schools. I’ve read a lot about the teachers opposing them.”
“Yes, I suppose you have—but they haven’t any right to do it. Is it their business to forbid our joining a club, provided our parents are willing? As for the Channing Board of Education, I guess we’ve hushed it up for one while. It made a rule, last year, shutting off fraternity and sorority members from a lot of high school privileges—trying to freeze out secret societies that way, you see—and we just took up a collection and hired a first-class lawyer and got an injunction against their enforcing that rule. They haven’t any legal right to do such a thing.”
Jacquette listened with a growing sense of her own lack of information. “But don’t you think there’s anything, then, in all this fuss about fraternities making class distinctions in school?” she asked cautiously.
“Not a thing! I’ll tell you how it is: All the fellows that are really worth anything get into some fraternity or other—and the same with the girls.”
They turned a corner and came within sight of Marston High School. It was a large grey stone building, rising abruptly from the street and separated from it only by two railed-in grass plots, one on each side of the walk leading to the main entrance. A few scrub oaks, straggling relics of the old forest which had once flourished where the hurrying, striving city now stood, shaded the windows at the south, but, except for these, everything was bare—as different as possible from the pleasant grounds surrounding the little Brookdale school.
“Oh, are we here?” Jacquette cried. “I wanted to ask you about planning my course, Quis.”
“Lots of time for that,” he told her. “You won’t do a thing but be rushed, to-day.”
“And just what is being ‘rushed,’ please?”
“Here’s somebody that will show you,” he answered, coming to a sudden stop on the sidewalk in front of the school building, where a group of girls were talking together.
They greeted Marquis gaily, and Jacquette’s name had hardly been pronounced before they came fluttering about her like butterflies. After a minute, Marquis laughingly withdrew, promising to look her up later.