“Turn traitor—no! I’m not thinking about offices. But you know, yourself, that the boys are planning to collect more money and fight the Board again, and doesn’t it seem to you, Flo, that it’s a question, now, of deciding between our sorority and our school?”
“But, Jack,” Flo answered, with tears in her voice. “Surely you’ll decide right!”
There was something so childishly one-sided in this appeal that Jacquette smiled, and, as she did so, she realised for the first time that she herself had almost outgrown Flo’s tragic view. But she understood that view too well to make the mistake of laughing at it.
“Aren’t there two sides, Florrie?” she coaxed. “Oughtn’t we to have a little of the same feeling toward Marston that college students have when they talk about their ‘Alma Mater’?”
“We aren’t hurting Marston!” came the retort. “It’s that horrid old Board that has spoiled the foot-ball team—and everything! It’s just a case of persecution.”
“Oh, Flo! Why, I don’t see what else the Board could do, if it wanted to discourage secret societies. It can’t forbid our joining them, you see, if our fathers and mothers let us, but perhaps it can manage to make them unpopular, by this rule.”
“Make itself unpopular, I guess you mean.”
“See here, Flo,” Jacquette asked, abruptly. “I want you to tell me something. If I should decide to give up Sigma Pi, would it break our friendship?”
“What a question! It would have to, of course. Do you suppose, if it really came to choosing between Sigma Pi and you, it would take me a minute to decide? But you’ll never do such a thing. You’re teasing me.”
“No, I’m not teasing,” Jacquette said, in a disappointed voice, and, after a few minutes more of fruitless discussion, she hung up the receiver, and sat thinking.