Marjorie laughed. "I know what you are thinking, Jeremiah," she said, with quiet amazement. "Don't worry. I shall not suggest a reform movement here for the Sans' moral benefit."
"Glad of it. Imagine me laboring patiently with that benighted heathen, Leslie Cairns, to help her to see herself as others see her," grumbled Jerry.
"How much the Sans would enjoy being called the heathen," interposed Katherine Langly.
"It's appropriate. When people behave like savages, they class themselves as such. It is a pity that we should be obliged to consider fellow students as enemies!" Jerry continued with vehemence. "Why should petty spite be carried to the point where it is a menace to the whole college? An institution for the higher education of young girls in particular should be free of such ignobility."
"Fights and fusses are not conducive to the cultivation of a scholarly mind," Helen Trent agreed with mock solemnity.
"They are not," returned Leila, with a strong Celtic inflection of which she, in her earnestness, was entirely unconscious.
Naturally it evoked laughter. Leila's occasional slight lapses into a brogue were invariably amusing to her chums.
"Laugh at my brogue if you wish, I will not break your bones," she said good-humoredly, making use of an ancient Irish expression. "I am most Celtic when serious. Ah, well! Perhaps it is petty in us even to be discussing the Sans, since we can say nothing good of them."
"That is their fault; not ours," Lucy Warner said incisively.
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in their stars, but in themselves, that they are underlings," Vera aptly applied with a change of pronouns.