There were no other offices to be filled. The Orchid Club was to be of a purely social nature, with no need of a secretary or treasurer. There was to be a dinner or luncheon twice each week at the expense of one or another of the club members, and a monthly meeting in the living room of the Hall.
“The Screech Owl has gone into local politics and is now a president,” Muriel breezily informed Leslie Cairns and Doris Monroe as she entered Doris’s and her room late one November afternoon to find the two deep in a discussion of psycho-analysis.
Leslie had taken up psychology and political science, the two subjects she had had on her senior program at the time of her expulsion from Hamilton. Thus far, since her return to Hamilton, she had wondered at the lack of unpleasant stir which had marked her reappearance on the campus as a student. It seemed that she might, after all, be fated to escape the harsh criticism which she felt would be justly her due. She had been agreeably disappointed in that Julia Peyton had not, to her knowledge, brought up against her as a matter of gossip the eventful night of the Rustic Romp.
“Julia Peyton a president?” Doris Monroe turned her blue-green eyes amusedly upon Muriel. “Of what, may I ask?”
“Of the Orchid Club. Isn’t that a select name. It suggests luxury, doesn’t it? Something like the Sans—I beg your pardon, Leslie.” Muriel checked herself, looking comically contrite. “I never think of you now as a San,” she went on in further apology.
“Don’t mind me,” Leslie waved off the apology. “You are exactly right in what you just said,” she continued half grimly. “I have been keeping a wary eye upon Miss Peyton and Miss Carter since I came to the Hall. I fully expected they might start trouble for me. I am amazed to think they haven’t. Leila is right, too, in saying the Hall is a house divided against itself. It’s not our side of it, though, that has put down a dividing line. By ‘our side’ I mean the Travelers, the Bertram girls and Doris. This Miss Peyton isn’t the sort of menace to the Hall that I used to be.” She smiled her slow smile. “She is like Lillian Walbert.”
“Right-o,” Muriel agreed with emphasis. “I’d forgotten all about her. Julia Peyton is more aggressive, though. Miss Walbert’s favorite amusement was gossiping, just the same. Only she thought it was automobiling.”
Muriel broke into a merry little run of laughter, an accompaniment to her mischievous statement regarding Lillian Walbert as a motorist.
“She was the worst flivver at driving a car that I ever recall having seen,” Leslie said, her black eyes twinkling reminiscently. She was not likely to forget the many ridiculous situations in which Lillian figured at various times and points on Hamilton Highway as a result of her fatuous belief in herself as a driver.
“A gossip is never anything either clever, or useful,” Doris Monroe observed with disdainful wisdom. “Julia Peyton is really quite stupid. She isn’t consistent, even in her villainy. She never sticks to one story. This isn’t intended as back-biting. I told her as much last spring. It is too bad she happened to be the one you tripped up with your umbrella, Leslie, at the Romp last spring. But I wouldn’t let it worry me. Julia Peyton always over-reaches herself. If I should chance to hear any spiteful remarks from her of you—” Doris paused, smiling with dangerous sweetness.