Neither Marjorie nor Muriel had entered the second basket ball try-out. Both had decided to wait until their sophomore year. Fond of the game, they dropped into the gymnasium occasionally for an hour’s work with the ball by way of keeping up practice. There were always plenty of subs willing to make up a team.
February came, bringing with it St. Valentine’s day, and the masque which the juniors always gave on St. Valentine’s night. A Valentine post box was one of the features. For days beforehand the girls spent odd moments in making valentines, the rule being that all valentines posted must have been hand wrought. Marjorie, remembering the cunning little-girl costume Mary Raymond had worn to Mignon La Salle’s fancy dress party, shortened a frilled pink organdie gown of hers and went back to childhood for a night. With pink flat-heeled kid slippers and pink silk stockings, an immense pink top-knot bow tying up a portion of her curls, she was a pretty sight. Ronny went as a Watteau shepherdess, Lucy as a Japanese girl, Muriel as Rosalind in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” and Jerry as a clown.
The valentine party was always a delightful feature of the college year, for the reason that it was a masquerade. Though the Sans had been holding themselves rigidly aloof from all but a few students since the downfall of Lola Elster as a basket ball star, they could not resist the lure of a masquerade. They took good care to keep together until after the unmasking, presumably for fear of mingling with what they considered as “the common herd.”
“Anyone with a good pair of keen eyes can tell the precious Sans though they should be happening to wear a dozen masks,” Leila Harper had derided. “They wear such silks and satins and velvets and jewels! They are wearying to the sight with their fine clothes. Look at me. A poor Irish colleen with nothing silk about me but one small neckerchief.”
Following the masquerade by only a few days came the excitement of the first game between the new team and the sophomores. The latter had not challenged the freshman team after its reorganization, as Leslie Cairns had voiced against it and neither Natalie nor Joan Myers cared to oppose her. Leslie possessed a very large fortune in her own right. In consequence she always had money in abundance. While the former had large allowances, they managed usually to overstep them. In such case they fell back on Leslie and were invariably in her debt.
Later Leslie changed her mind about not wishing the sophomores to play against the “upstarts,” as she termed them. Having overheard on the campus that the sophs were afraid to meet the freshies, she accordingly urged Joan to challenge the freshman team.
When the game came off on the third Saturday in February, the freshmen gave the sophomores a drubbing they would not soon forget. It was not a whitewash, but it was painfully near it. The sophomore players took the defeat with very poor grace. The freshman class had gone wild when the game had ended 26-10 in favor of the freshmen. While the sophs had not expected a walk-away victory, they had confidently expected to win. Further, Leslie had promised them a dinner at Baretti’s that should outdo anything she had given that year. Now that they had lost the game, she obstinately refused to keep her word.
“Why spend my good money on a crowd of no accounts like you?” she had roughly queried. “I said if you won I’d give the dinner. You did not, so what’s the use in celebrating. The fault with you girls is you’ve been slackers about practicing. You’ve gone motoring when you should have been in the gym and after the ball.” This rebuke was delivered in the sophs’ dressing room after the game, whence the team had hurried to hide their diminished heads.
“Do you know what I heard out on the floor?” she continued, with intent to hurt. “I heard that the sophs might have won if they had practiced once in a while.”
“Just the same the freshies had coaching all the time and we didn’t,” Dulcie Vale asserted. “Miss Dean and Miss Harding are both expert players. It seems that they play basket ball a lot at these high schools. These girls get to be very clever at it. Like the Indians, you know, who make such good foot ball players. They showed the team different plays to use against us. That’s why they won. They have been over to the gym almost every day.”