“I don’t want any such reward. That’s just the trouble with you, Leslie. You are always offering me so much more than I can ever return. I wish you were going to the dance, to stay all evening and have a good time with the others.” Doris sincerely meant the wish.
“You know whose fault it is that I can’t.” Leslie shrugged significantly. “Now I must plan my costume.” She straightened in her chair with a faint sigh. “I’ll sport blue overalls, a brown and red gingham shirt, large plaid, with no collar; a turkey-red cotton hankie, a big floppy hayseed hat and a striped umbrella.” She chuckled as she enumerated these items of costume.
“I had thought seriously of going as a swain, but decided against it. I’d rather look pretty. I have a certain reputation to keep up on the campus. I’d prefer not to caricature myself.”
“You make me smile, Goldie. How you worship that precious beauty reputation of yours! You may be right about it. I presume you are.”
Leslie’s rugged face grew momentarily downcast. She was thinking morosely that if, like Doris, she had been half as careful in whom she trusted and to what risks she lent herself when at Hamilton she might have escaped disgrace.
“I know I am.” Doris was emphatical. She noted the gloomy change in Leslie’s features and understood partly what had occasioned it. Those four words, “I presume you are,” made more impression on Doris than any other reference to her college trouble or against Marjorie Dean, which she had ever before heard Leslie make. It held a compelling, resigned inference of unfair treatment at the hands of others. Those others were of course Miss Dean and her friends. Doris allowed herself to jump to that conclusion. She had fostered jealous disdain of Marjorie until it had become antipathy. She knew Leslie’s faults, but she chose to overlook them. She had sometimes regarded Leslie’s accusations against “Bean” as overdrawn. Now she felt more in sympathy with Leslie’s standing grudge against Marjorie Dean than at any time since she had known Leslie.
CHAPTER XI.
A RUSTIC DISASTER
The evening of April eleventh saw Hamilton campus in the possession of a social throng, large, rural and hilarious. The spring twilight was scarcely ready to drop faint lavender shades over departed day when from the various student houses on the big green issued veritable country bumpkins in festival attire. They appeared singly, in twos, threes, quartettes and straggling groups.
Fortunately for the rovingly-inclined bands of rural pleasure-seekers the night was warm and balmy. In the mild fragrant spring air, the giggling maids flaunted their bright calicos and ginghams, unhidden in their cotton glory by shawl, coat or cape.