The twins shook hands delightedly, and Patsy, irritated at her slip, grabbed again for the hair-pins, incidentally discovering a silver shoe-horn and a fountain pen.
"Very clever you are—very," she remarked coldly. "Quite unusual, and so young, too. No wonder your parents are worried!"
This was a bitter cut, for the twins were industriously engaged in living down the report that the Registrar had in their freshman year received a note from Mrs. Sutton imploring her to curb if necessary their passion for study, which invariably brought on nervous headaches. This was peculiarly interesting to their friends, who had never remarked any undue application on their part and were, of course, proportionately eager to caution them against it. They squirmed visibly now and changed their tone abruptly.
"They say that Frances Wilde was terribly disappointed about making Alpha—she'd much rather have got Phi Kappa," said Kate, with a mixture of malice and humility.
Patsy was silent. Martha grinned and took up the conversation.
"But her heart would have been broken if she hadn't gotten in this year," she returned amiably.
Patsy turned and glared at them, one arm in the silk waist.
"What utter nonsense!" she broke out. "As if it made any matter, one way or the other! As if it made two cents' worth of difference! You know perfectly well that it's no test at all—making a society. Look at the girls who are in! It's a farce, as Neal says—" She stopped and scowled at them defiantly. The twins gasped. This from a society girl to them, as yet unelect! Even for a conversation with the Sutton twins, with whom, owing to their own contagious example, truth was bound to fly out sooner or later, this was unusual. It was odd enough to discuss the societies at all with perfectly eligible sophomores who might reasonably expect to enter one or another sometime and who were nevertheless yet uncalled; but the twins discussed everything with everybody, utterly regardless of etiquette, tradition, or propriety, and their upper-classroom-mates had long ago given up any ideas of reserve and discipline they might have held.
Martha gasped but promptly replied. "That's all very well for Cornelia Burt," she said, with the famous Sutton grin. "Anybody who made the Alpha in the first five and was known well enough to have been especially wanted in Phi Kappa and even begged to refuse—"
"How did you know that, Martha Sutton?"