“I will go and so will Ronny and Muriel.” Marjorie gave the promise for herself and friends.
Miss Greene now out of the question, and Elaine having obtained Miss Savage’s signature, there was no further time wasted. The letter was sent and the freshmen rested their case until a reply came. Reply, however, was not forthcoming. Up to the day when college closed for the Christmas holidays Miss Reid had made no sign save to haughtily ignore the justice-seeking freshmen when she encountered them on the campus. The six girls, who formed the committee for final action, quietly agreed that as soon as they returned from their holiday vacation they would immediately wait upon Miss Reid and demand justice.
Occupied with this matter, Marjorie had allowed her own affairs to slide for a time. The day before going home, she recalled with regret that she had intended to invite Leila Harper to spend the holidays with her. It was too late now. Still, there would be the Easter vacation. She would invite Leila for that, before going home. Leila’s bright blue eyes filled with tears when Marjorie delivered her invitation.
“You are a darling,” she said unsteadily. “I would accept in a minute, but I am going home with Vera. Easter, now you have asked me, I will accept with loud Irish rejoicing. Vera is almost as much of a stray as I. Her father is Roderick Mason, the portrait painter. They have a whopping old apartment in the Glendenning, on Central Park, west. It is part studio. Her mother died when she was three weeks old. Her father brought her up. He’s a fine man, but erratic. Whatever she asks him for he says: ‘Yes, yes; but don’t annoy me with it.’ He loves her when he happens to recall that he has a daughter,” Leila ended half bitterly.
“I wish Vera would spend Easter with us, too,” Marjorie said quickly. “I shall invite her before I go home. Come along. We will ask her now. I am going home on that eight-ten train in the morning, so I won’t have time then to see her.”
Leila’s face was aglow with a new-found happiness as she and Marjorie ran up the stairs to Vera’s room. There was that in Marjorie’s sweet cordiality which thawed the ice about her heart. Next to Vera, she had received Marjorie into her affections. In consequence, she was more in touch with Marjorie’s college affairs than the latter dreamed. Leila was in possession of the news of the freshman revolt against Miss Reid, but she kept it strictly to herself. She also honored Marjorie and her chums for being able to keep a secret. The news, in reality, had been published abroad by Miss Reid herself, who had showed the letter to Natalie Weyman, Leslie Cairns and even Lola Elster. These three had been furiously angry over the attempt to “put one over,” as Leslie Cairns had expressed herself.
“Let it go until we come back from our vacation. Don’t see any of them,” she stolidly advised Miss Reid. “I will find a way to settle them. Lola stays on the team. I heard this Miss Dean, Beauty, you know,” she sneered, “was trotting around with the paper. I know a way to even up scores with her. Leave it to me. Oh, yes. I’ll tell you one thing you may do. Write that snippy Miss Page and demand her resignation from the team. That will make the revolutionists wild. As soon as we come back make the freshies challenge us to play. I’ll see that they win next time and don’t you flunk, either. The soph’s team will have to do as I say. They all owe me money.”
Miss Reid entertained great respect for the Cairns money, though at heart she was not fond of Leslie and her bullying ways. She was obliged to admit that Leslie Cairns was a born politician. This was not strange. Her father was Peter Cairns, the hardest-headed tyrant among a group of financiers who based all values on money.
“I believe you are right, Leslie, about the freshman team challenging the sophomore team directly after the holidays,” she reluctantly conceded. “If the freshman team should win, it would put a stop to this nonsense. I shall put a stop to it, at any rate, by simply ignoring it.” Miss Reid was carefully ignoring all recognition of the fact that Leslie had the upper hand and was dictating to her. This fact was not lost on Leslie.
“The freshman team must win,” she said, looking hard at the physical instructor. “If you can’t manage it, I will send for a coach who can. I can have him here for two weeks before the game. He can live in town and I’ll run him out here in my car every day to coach the team. I don’t mean Fulton. He is too namby-pamby. I mean a coach who will really train the team and at the same time keep off any freshmen who start to interfere.”