Quickly guessing the subject of their conversation, she interposed.
“Oh, breathes there a Radcliffe girl so silly as to think that Clarissa had anything to do with that book-plate affair?”
Whereupon the others, Juniors and Sophomores, admitted that they had not wholly believed Clarissa responsible for Annabel’s discomfiture, although one of them added that there seemed little doubt that Clarissa had sanctioned the newspaper article. Yet, if Polly could not make an adequate reply to this (for not yet had she completed her detective work), she assured them that Clarissa was so popular that she had been urged to join the basket ball team, and that through her the class was to reach a pinnacle of fame in athletics.
Indeed, during this year it seemed as if athletic rather than scholastic glory was the thing most sought for. The new Gymnasium had given an impetus to all kinds of athletics, and with the increasing size of the classes, the long-delayed class spirit was beginning to develop.
Julia was a spectator at the Athletic Reception given by the Freshmen, and she laughed and applauded all the sports from the potato races to some of those trials of skill that required great proficiency. She had sprained her ankle very slightly soon after college opened, and this prevented her usual gymnasium work.
It was natural that there should be many little coteries at Radcliffe, and that some should be more devoted than others to study, and others more devoted to the lighter side of college life. Julia, now that she and Ruth were less inseparable, found herself turning more and more to Lois, and for Lois she began to feel even more sympathy than for Pamela. Although Pamela had had to struggle, she still had been able on the whole to carry out her plans. Lois, on the other hand, had constantly been obliged to contend with an unsympathetic family. Her mother thought that on leaving the High School she ought to have been contented with a year in a training school. This would at once have fitted her for public school teaching. Money certainly was needed in the family, and Lois was not selfish. Yet when a relative, appreciative of her talent and ambition, offered her the money for the four years’ tuition at Radcliffe, she felt it to be not only a privilege, but a duty to accept. Lois in accepting, however, in the midst of her college work had constantly the feeling that she ought to consider her family more. It was indeed a difficult task to which she had set herself, to be both the dutiful daughter at home and the college student keeping her studies of first importance. It was the old story of trying to serve two masters; she was unable completely to please her family, and she lost much of the joy of college life because she could give so little time to the pleasant idling in which a girl must indulge if she wishes to be popular.
Even to herself, Lois perhaps never said that she wished to be popular. Yet she had an inborn spirit of leadership; and if she had listened to the urgings of her friends, she would have allowed herself to be a candidate for the Idler Presidency.
“It’s perfectly useless,” she remonstrated. “I haven’t the time, I haven’t the least chance of success. Besides, a great many other girls are much better fitted for the office. Honestly, I don’t think that I have a single qualification.”
“Ah, but you’d make such an ornamental President,” said Polly teasingly, knowing that this was the least sensible argument to use, for Lois not only seemed quite unconscious of her own attractiveness, but disliked these frivolous remarks. Yet although Polly spoke thus teasingly, she was in earnest in what she said.
“I haven’t enough energy myself to electioneer,” she had said to Julia, “but I’m going to make myself as agreeable as I can to everybody; and if you will help, and if Clarissa will help, and in fact if every one will help, why, Lois shall be the Idler President.”