"Adieu, mon enfant—à plus tard!" and Suzanne seized the door knob. She turned in the door and threw a quick, piercing look at her handiwork. "If you take my advice, you'll never put on that dreadful shirt-waist again, très chère," she said lightly. "You'll spoil all this splendor, if you do. Give it away—or, no, don't! you'd corrupt the taste of the poor—burn it up, and the others with it, and get a black suit and a black silk waist and wear a big white tie, if you like. And a white tam—one of those pussy ones. Wear one color—c'est plus distingué—and if you want a big black hat with plumes, I'll make it for you. Et maintenant, regarde-toi dans la glace!"
With this invocation they left her, and Biscuits, learning that Suzanne had exhausted her energy and proposed to inform her freshman that she was ill and unable to attend the reception, became possessed by the idea that she was responsible for this particular illustration of the artistic temperament, and went without her dinner to hunt up a substitute. She wasted no time in argument with Suzanne, who lay luxuriously on her couch pillows with her hands under her head, and planned costumes for Evangeline Potts all the evening, but tramped angrily over the campus till quarter of seven to find an unattached sophomore, forgetting that Evangeline's flowers were yet to be purchased. Coming up with them in her hand, a little later, she was forced to stop and explain to the substitute the intricacies of Suzanne's programme, breaking off abruptly to beat her breast like the wedding guest, for she heard the loud bassoon and fled to her room, tearing her evening dress hopelessly and completing her toilette on the stairs. The substitute suffered from a violent headache as the result of her unexpected exertions, and the little freshman cried herself to sleep, for she had dreamed for nights of going with Suzanne, whom she admired to stupefaction.
But of all this Evangeline Potts knew little, and, it may be, cared less. She was one of the successes of the evening, and her few remarks were quoted diligently. She could have danced dozens of extras, had so many been possible, and Biscuits was considered to have displayed more than her ordinary cleverness in procuring a creature so picturesque and distinguished.
This did not surprise her, nor did she particularly resent being pointed out by more than one freshman as "the sophomore that took that stunning Miss Potts"; but her amazement was undisguised, the next morning but one, at the sight of Evangeline walking out from chapel with a prominent junior, the glamor of the evening gone, it is true, her face somewhat heavy and undeniably freckled, but nevertheless an Evangeline transformed. From her fluffy white cap to the hem of her dignified black skirt she was the realization of Suzanne's parting suggestions, and the distinct intention of her costume had its full effect. She was far more impressive than the jolly little short-skirted junior, whose curly yellow hair paled beside the dark richness of Evangeline's massive coils, and Biscuits, remembering that she had called her "a perfect stick," marvelled inwardly.
She went to call on her a little later, but Evangeline was not in; and feeling that her duty was done, Miss Kitts gave no further thought to what she considered an essentially uninteresting person, but devoted herself to a study of the campus house into which she had moved only that year.
She saw Evangeline very rarely after that, except at the dances and plays, where her white shoulders framed in auburn velvet appeared very regularly. Once, happening to sit beside her, she began a conversation, but she could not remember afterward that Miss Potts said anything but, "Yes, indeed," or, "Yes, I think so, too." Her surprise was therefore great when, on hearing the result of the sophomore elections the next fall, and audibly commenting on the oddity of Miss Evangeline Potts in the position of sophomore president, she was indignantly assured by a loyal member of that class that the vote was almost unanimous and that she was one of the ablest girls in the class.
Even this she did not consider long, for the sophomore presidency is the least important of the four; but when among the first five sophomores to be triumphantly ushered into Phi Kappa Psi she was asked to consider the name of Evangeline Potts, she remonstrated.
"But she's not clever! She's not half so bright as lots we haven't got!" she objected. "Why do we want her?"
"She's no prod, of course, but she's a prominent girl and class president," was the answer, "and she's really very strong, I think—they say she does fair work, and everybody but you wants her. Do you really disapprove of her?"
"Oh, no!" said Biscuits, and watched Miss Potts with interest. She received her congratulations quietly, with a manner that made one wonder if they had been quite in good taste, and acted altogether as if she had fully expected to enter the society with Ursula Wyckoff and Dodo Bent. The senior class president took her out of chapel at the head of the file, with a bunch of violets as big as her two fists pinned to her belt, and Biscuits was asked to a supper in her honor in the campus house she had recently entered.