“Let her alone, she isn’t worth worrying about,” said Hinpoha, beginning to be just as cross as she had been enthusiastic before. “She hasn’t a spark of sociability in her.”
“There are Hermit Souls——” began Oh-Pshaw, and Agony cut in with
“Twinkle, twinkle, little Sal,
How we’d like to be your pal,
But you hold your nose so high
You don’t see us passing by.”
That ended Sally Prindle as far as the LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS were concerned. But I had an uncomfortable feeling all the time that if Nyoda had been there she would have managed to become friendly with Sally in some way, and that we had failed to “warm the heart” of this “lonely mortal” who “stood without our open portal.” Sally haunted me. How any girl could live and not be friendly with the people she saw every day was more than I could understand. She just grubbed away at her lessons, paid no attention to what went on around her, snubbed any girl who tried to make advances and lived a life of lofty detachment. She was a good student and invariably recited correctly when called upon, but beyond that none of the teachers could get a particle of warmth out of her, not even fascinating Miss Allison, who has all her classes worshipping at her feet.
Sally worried me for a while; then she moved out of Purgatory and took a room with some private family in town and as I hardly ever saw her any more I forgot her after a time. Life is so very full here, Katherine dear, that you can’t bother much about any one person.
Of course, the big thought that runs through everything this year, all our work and all our play, is the War and what we can do to help. At the beginning of the year Brownell pledged herself to raise five thousand dollars for the Red Cross by various activities; this was outside of the personal subscription fund. A big Christmas bazaar and several benefit performances brought the total close to four thousand, but the last thousand proved to be a sticker. Various committees were called to discuss ways and means of raising the money, but they never could agree on anything for the whole college to do together, and finally abandoned the quest for a bright idea and decided to let everybody raise money in any way they could think of and put it all together to make up the total. The Board of Trustees offered a silver loving cup to the individual, club, sorority, group or clique of any kind that raised the largest amount inside of a month.
The day that was announced there was a hastily called meeting of the LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS.