“Oh, she doesn’t care to make a speech now, girls,” sneered Dulcie Vale. “Too bad! We really ought to take her down to the Colonial and blow her off to one of our real dinners. I doubt if you could get one like these specials to the San Soucians in Sanford. We haven’t yet had the honor of escorting the college beauty about the campus.”
“She has so many studies,” sighed Leslie Cairns, “and with committee meetings and team work, too, her valuable time is just simply all taken up! What I would advise, Miss Bean; no, Dean, is a little less interest in——”
Up to this point Marjorie had listened with calm serenity to the Sans’ attempts to follow out an old English school custom of “ragging.” The instant she noted the change from sarcasm to belligerence in Leslie Cairns’ tones, she became ready to speak and act.
“How utterly silly you all are,” she said with the utmost composure. “You have no wish to know me. I have no wish to know you. As for the things you are attempting to insinuate against me, what possible harm in the end can such untruths do? Good afternoon.”
Her steady brown eyes turned searchingly on her tormentors for an instant, Marjorie made a detour, passed the momentarily speechless group and continued steadily across the campus.
“What?” Leslie Cairns uttered her usual expression blankly. “What?” she said again. This time with growing displeasure.
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Natalie Weyman’s high cold voice. “Of all the insolence! One might think we were peasants and she a princess!”
“Why didn’t somebody say something before she got away?” demanded Joan Myers wrathfully. “I was speechless when she said that about our being silly. She might as well have called us all liars.”
“Are you sure your friend Rowena is right about that high school trouble, Les?” Natalie anxiously inquired.
“Yes, she is,” Leslie snapped, irritated out of her customary drawl. “She saw the whole thing. Then this Dean girl tried to lay it to her. Her father was so enraged over it that he took Rowena out of high school and sent her to Miss Alpine’s School for Girls. That is an expensive school, too. The Farnhams have millions. You ought to see their place at Tanglewood! An English duke built the house and then went broke. It’s a humming little palace, I will say. Cost a million at least.”