“I’d rather be a goose than a walrus,” grinned Jerry. “As for telling; let Marjorie do it. No; I mean, I’d rather you’d spring it on them. Oh, what’s the use? Slang and I are one.” Jerry sighed an exaggerated sorrow over her vain effort at eliminating inelegant English from her vocabulary.
“It must be something very important,” put in Susan, with a derisive chuckle, “or Jeremiah would never resort to slang.”
Jerry’s grin merely widened. “Go ahead and tell them, Marjorie. Hurry up.”
“It’s just this way, children.” Marjorie leaned forward a trifle, her brown eyes roving over the little group of eager-faced listeners. “For a long time Jerry and I have had the idea of forming a club. We talked of it last year, after Christmas, and again after we gave the operetta. But you know what a hard year we had over basketball, and then so many of us became sick that somehow the club idea was put away and forgotten. But now, as Jerry says, ‘the time has come.’ What we’d like to do is to form a club from a certain number of girls in the senior class. It mustn’t be just a social affair but one devoted to the purpose of looking out for anyone that needs our help. Of course when first we start we won’t be able to do much. Later we may find it in our power to do a good deal.”
“And if the club’s a success,” interposed Jerry, “Marjorie thinks it would be nice to pass it along, name and all, to the next senior class. Then they could will it to the next and so on. It would be a sorority, only I hope you won’t go and burden it with a Greek letter name. We ought to give it a name that would mean a lot to anyone who happens to hear of it.” Despite her insistence that Marjorie should put forward the project, Jerry could not resist having her say, too.
“That’s a fine idea,” glowed Harriet Delaney. “How many girls ought we to have in it?”
“I should think ten or twelve would be enough to start with,” returned Marjorie meditatively. “If we decide later that we need more we can have the pleasure of initiating them. Has anyone of you a pencil and paper?”
Muriel immediately brought forth a notebook from her leather school bag. Susan Atwell promptly produced the required pencil.
“Write on the back page of it, Marjorie,” directed Muriel. “If you put down our illustrious names anywhere else in the book, I am likely to mix them with my zoology notes.”
“Imagine Muriel standing up in class and innocently reading: ‘To the Crustacean family belong Jerry Macy, Marjorie Dean, Harriet Delaney, etc.,’” giggled Susan Atwell. Whereupon a ripple of giggles swept the zealous organizers.