“That’s the thing!” Flo Burton exclaimed, as Louise took her seat.
“That’s what we’ll do!” “Make her inactive for a year.” “You needn’t do a bit of work, Jacquette, but we can’t spare you and we just couldn’t disgrace you before the whole school. We love you too much.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you spoke of that, Louise!” cried all the girls together, throwing the order of the meeting to the winds as they crowded about the chair where Jacquette sat, her face flooded with sudden gladness.
Louise had not given her an inkling of what she meant to do, and Jacquette had never thought of hoping that the girls might cling to her, regardless of her active usefulness to the sorority. The whole spirit of the meeting was so different from the thing which she had braced herself to endure that it swept her along, unresisting, and it began to seem as if she had created, in her own imagination, a bogy which never existed. What harm could there be in simply keeping the friendship of the girls?
“Oh, Louise,” she whispered, eagerly, catching the hand of her closest friend, “do you think it’s all right? Would Tia be just as well pleased?”
“Don’t see why not,” was the sturdy answer. “It gives you back all your time for study and home things, and just prevents your losing the friendship of the girls you like best. I think she’ll be glad, or I shouldn’t have proposed it.”
As they crowded about Jacquette, her face flooded with sudden gladness
So it was settled, and when Jacquette, still wearing her pin, walked home with a body-guard of devoted Sigma Pi girls following to the door, it seemed as if a great cloud had rolled out of her sky. Inactive membership would have seemed impossible before the moment when she had made up her mind to endure actual expulsion, but now, with its promise of comparative secrecy, its assurance of continued friendship from the girls, and its possibility of a return to activity sometime in the future, it glittered like a beautiful reward of virtue.
She was so sure of having done the right thing, that it was hard to be patient and explain, when Aunt Sula and her grandfather seemed doubtful, but she succeeded, and, when she finally went upstairs alone, she smiled at a happy Jacquette in the mirror, resolving that Tia should see, from day to day, how truly inactive membership would give all the benefits and none of the drawbacks of the uncompromising other plan.