“Too bad. Don’t you think you might——”
“Coax her to be inactive? Never in the world! You ought to have heard her pity me, this morning! She’s a dandy girl, though. I was thinking, to-day, that if she’d only happened to be a Sigma Pi, she and I would have had such fine times together all through high school. Here’s that duet I was looking for. We haven’t played it for ages. Let’s try it.”
Next morning, when Jacquette reached school she found an unusual buzz of excitement outside the building. Newspapers were fluttering everywhere, and knots of boys and girls were standing about, each group with heads close together over some intensely interesting article that they were reading.
The Sigma Pi girls were gathered near the school entrance, and, as Jacquette came up, Mamie Coolidge thrust a paper under her eyes.
“See that,” she ordered, pointing to the tall headlines,
“BOARD OF EDUCATION
SCORES AGAINST
SECRET SOCIETIES”
“They’ve got our injunction set aside, Jack,” Blanche Gross hurried to explain, without waiting for Jacquette to read the rest. “So now they can enforce that horrid rule against secret societies, and they’re going to do it. And do you realise what it means, right here in Sigma Pi? No sorority girl can hold a class office any more. That makes Etta give up the secretaryship of the junior class!”
“And it takes Blanche out of the senior dramatics; that’s worse,” Etta broke in.
“And Flo Burton off the basket-ball team,” Blanche took it up again. “And as for football, the Marston eleven will simply go to smash. Nearly every fellow on it is a fraternity man.”
“Oh, it will kill this school, that’s all!” Mamie Coolidge declared. “It may not make so much difference in schools where there aren’t so many secret societies, and of course we’ll get another injunction very soon, but, in the meantime, Marston High will suffer more than we will, that’s one sure thing.”