“I thank you. An’ you forget you say you come an’ play, I tell you ’bout it sometime you come here to eat,” he warned the party as they were leaving.
“Talk about truth being stranger than fiction, what do you think of Giuseppe’s story?” Jerry exclaimed as soon as they were well away from the inn. “Imagine how one would feel to meet one’s long-lost brother just as one was getting ready to commit suicide!”
“One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives,” Ronny said with a shake of her fair head.
“To see Giuseppe today, successful and well-to-do, one finds it hard to visualize him as the poor, starved, despondent Italian boy who cried his heart out on the doorstep.” Vera’s tones vibrated with sympathy. The Italian’s story had impressed her deeply.
The girls discussed it soberly as they wended a leisurely way across the campus. Even care-free Muriel, who seldom liked to take life seriously, remarked with becoming earnestness that it was such stories which made one realize one’s own benefits.
“Be on hand tomorrow night at eight-thirty sharp,” was Phyllis’s parting injunction to the Wayland Hall girls as the Silvertonites left them to go on to their own house. “We have three fair ladies to sing to and we don’t want to slight any of them.”
“I think we ought to get up some entertainments of our own this year. I never stopped to realize before how few clubs and college societies Hamilton has. There’s only the ‘Silver Pen’,—one has to have high literary ability to make that,—the ‘Twelfth Night Club’ and the ‘Fortnightly Debating Society.’ We haven’t a single sorority,” Vera declared with regret.
“Miss Remson told me once of a sorority that Hamilton used to have called the ‘Round Table.’ It flourished for many years. Then all of a sudden she heard no more of it. She said Hamilton was very different even ten years ago from now. There was little automobiling and more sociability among the campus houses. There were house plays going on every week and different kinds of entertainments in which almost everyone joined.”
“That’s the way college ought to be,” commended Vera. “Even if Hamilton hasn’t yet won back to those palmy days, we had more fellowship here last year than the year before. Why, during Leila’s and my freshman year here we were seldom invited anywhere. We hardly knew Helen Trent until late in the year. Nella and Selma, Martha Merrick and Rosalind Black were our only friends.”
“And now we are to lose Selma.” Leila heaved an audible sigh. She had already informed the girls of Selma’s approaching marriage to a young naval officer.