It was a simple, straightforward story, told with evident effort, and listened to in breathless silence by the girls. As Jacquette went on, a blank dismay grew on all the faces, but to her relief there was not a trace of the unfriendly resentment and bitterness that she had dreaded. It dawned upon her, while she stood there speaking, that a very different feeling had grown up between herself and the girls since the quarrel of almost a year before, and the thought added a new hurt to the step she was taking, but it did not make her falter.
She told them frankly how the first half of her freshman year had been so filled to overflowing with sorority business and sorority fun that her studies had been a farce; how she had often been actually crowded into the necessity of preparing one lesson during the recitation of another. She reminded them of her failure to pass for the month in two studies, just before the semi-finals, and of her determination, after that, to show everybody that she could be a sorority girl and a student, too, an undertaking which had proved too much for her physical strength.
“But it isn’t only on account of scholarship and health that I’m saying this,” she finished, honestly. “The truth is, girls, while I love you all as much as ever, I can’t help knowing that I do owe something to my home and the people in it. Last year, it was just a place to rush into for eating and sleeping. My interests were all somewhere else. Another thing: I haven’t a rich father, the way most of you have. I haven’t any father living. There is a certain sum of money set aside for my education, but it isn’t large, and the proportion of it that went into my first year at Marston was so much more than it had any right to be that the one reason of expense is enough to make me feel that I ought to give up being a Sigma Pi.”
Jacquette felt her knees begin to shake as she reached this period, and she sat down rather abruptly. For a minute no one made a sound.
Then Mamie Coolie, leaning forward, asked in a horrified tone,
“Jacquette, you can’t mean you’re going to make us expel you?”
Jacquette’s face quivered, but she managed to answer steadily, “I suppose it’s the only way.”
“Oh!” “How dreadful!” “But we can’t expel Jacquette.” “Tell her she’s wild to think of it.” “Talk her out of it, Louise,” were the whispers that flew round the room. Flo Burton sprang to her feet to protest, but she sat down again, sobbing, and then handkerchief after handkerchief went up as the girls saw that there were tears in Jacquette’s own eyes.
Etta Brainerd, who was presiding, still sat in dumb amazement, trying to grasp the full significance of the thing, when Louise Markham’s voice caught the attention of everybody.
“I just want to remind you, girls,” she was saying, quietly, “that inactive membership excuses a member from all duties connected with the sorority. She isn’t required to help in the rushing, to go to spreads or initiations, in fact to do anything. She doesn’t have to pay dues. She simply wears her pin and is just as much one of us as ever in her spirit toward us and ours toward her. She’s allowed to know sorority secrets and she gets bids to the dances and all that, just like an alumna, and the best of it all is that no one outside of the sorority has to be any the wiser. There’s not a thing about inactive membership that could possibly interfere with one’s scholarship, or one’s health, or one’s pocket-book, and if the time comes when circumstances permit the inactive member to become active again, all she has to do is to say so. Of course I don’t want to dictate, when I’m not going to be here myself, but I just offer these remarks as a suggestion.”